STREET OPERAS IN THE ZONA ROSA
(The Zona Rosa is a fashionable restaurant and
shopping district in Mexico City)
1
After 40 years he can only imagine
why he remembers the accident,
the fragment of a long-forgotten opera,
an instant of music he still can hear:
the cat run down by a car in the darkness
of the Zona Rosa--except that
the cat was not dead, not yet.
Alive and suffering, it hissed
and blindly scratched against
the dénouement, its final agony,
and he, merely a chorister,
making gestures of helpless pity.
Perhaps sentimentalism is why
he remembers it: how he shoveled
the cat to the shadow of the curb
so it could, he hoped,
die in peace: but poor kitty, sweet kitty,
turned to its roots in the jaguar,
tormented, ripped at the arm
of its would-be comforter,
the scratch his loss of anonymity:
for he has stepped forward
out of the chorus,
into the meaning of gesture,
the price of futile goodness.
2
Perhaps all incongruity is operatic.
A cat crushed on a summer evening
in the Zona Rosa
intrudes violence into the world
of French restaurants and haute couture.
The Zona trembles like scenery
in the middle of a city
built in a volcano he feared (and fears)
was not quite extinct after all.
The city is only a *mise en scene*,
a savagery paved.
The hidden lake beneath
the Zona Rosa streets
bulges with the bones of
sacrificed virgin children,
priests wrapped in
jaguar skins.
KW/11-25-09
[A memory of a Mexico City that probably no longer exists--the memory
was from 1967, before the Olympics, the Metro, and industrial pollution.]
--
----------------------------
Ken Wolman
http://awfulrowing.wordpress.com
http://opensalon.com/blog/kenneth_wolman
http://wearethecure.org/friends/cids-memory-p-394.html
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