by Steven Johnsrud
(03/24/10)

Our rains come at different times of year in our respective climates, northern California and Estelí, Nicaragua. This has contributed to my beginning to court her in the third person, and even with my omniscient author. The first and second person looms too close. The third person gives us anonymity and allows us to use the hypothetical more freely. He, she, or it sounds more vague and vaga than the self revelatory I. Wanderers allow their constellations to mingle when in reciprocal orbits like binary stars. We are all stardust, anyway, I am told.

Rain on the window pane. A long time it's been since that fashion of window hovered over a dusty wooden sill with dead box elder bugs rotting on the ledge in their black and red coats, Sandinista bugs I suppose. This story is not for nortenos or norteamericanos. It must be read listening to a patter of rain on a noisy corrugated roof of metal in a land where clothes are washed by hand or scrubbed in long stone basins that drain away the water into the earth of the yard. Everything is by hand, even love. Water is cold. Showers are cold. Laundry water is cold. Drinks are not. Drinks are fiery like Nica libres or regionally grown new vintages of wine. Drinks pour down the gullet and take away the cold and glow with a ruby hue inside the heart.

When Jesus walks in Estelí, when he comes to your house, his feet will be washed, his chimelas, his sandals. The poor have a bond with him in tired feet which must walk everywhere. School children are almost "lucky" to even have the chimelas, which sound exotic but are more like our 79 cent shower shoes at the dollar store. I think of the feet of the children, how easily toes stub running down hills and balancing on fence beams. I think of how they are closer to the earth, both in stature and in affinity with nature. A game northern intellectuals play to romanticize the suffering of the poor, as they sit in their three pairs of Nikes, bought overpriced and produced in sweat shops of the world. Jesus didn't advertise brand names. He walked. He still walks with his friends who love the poor in Nicaragua and make their preferential option with the poor their vocation of love and suffering and solidarity. Perhaps they never read Gutierrez' Liberation Theology; they read a brochure to join the Peace Corps, and like Isaiah they said, Here I am, send me.

The rich man will go to hell, but he'll transform it to Dante's Inferno and make it into an art and feel smugly satisfied that he failed so successfully, at last admitted through Rodin's Gates of Hell to be immortalized. Hell is for children who first suffer it here in hunger and illness and stubbed toes, carrying water to drink. They thirst. The poor man will enter paradise and not be able to recognize it because he will say, "Didn't I already live here near the mountains of Condega?" What has changed? Where is the rich man to oppress me? Where is the master to tell me what to do? Where is the water I must carry on my back, and the orchards and vineyards I must labor in with my back? Where is the strong drink where I can drink and forget and worship the god "manana"? The idea is not mine. I was taught this by Anais Nin. And like most of my good ideas, they come from women. Anais Nin wrote that the Latin god was manana. It's the day the rich will go to hell and the poor will dwell in paradise, but for today, the roles are reversed.

She is sleepless in Estelí, listening to winter rain, reading a poet who sees with his words to a woman who speaks with her hands, and she says the right things in her own way even if she is shy of writing down the words. Maybe like some Indians and African natives once feared cameras, that they would steal the person's identity in the photograph. Indigenes know better that the spirit is elusive and may be robbed by vanity and taken away and starved by tempting with a hunger for fame and an appetite for self promotion. She decorates her body like an Incan princess, but never sends the evidence of her art from humility, not shame. She is dark and though by race of a northern clime, I think of her as a Latina already because the evidence is in her blood. The sun has rebirthed her a Latina while the moon has bewitched her into a vaga. She has blue eyes to journey lovers on the sea but brown arms to row with them in the galleys and to scrub the clothes in the stone basins and reach up and hold the stars in her cold outdoor shower when Aphrodite smiles on her little sister. She is sleepless in Estelí when the dancing has not left her feet at the cantina, and beyond that such speculation I cannot trespass. Lead us not into trespasses, I pray, but deliver us from evil, knowing full well how tempting being human always is, else it wouldn't have been included in the Our Father. When we cease being sinners, we cease being. The broken bread is only for the broken people. The cup only rightfully belongs to those who taste freely of love and eat one another's bodies hungrily. The damned are the rich who scorn the grape and daub the wine on fine linen instead of on the rags of their sleeves. She is sleepless and sleeveless in Estelí, listening to the rain.

Being vaga is a complicated thing, and wandering is a full time position. I am too hard on the rich, you say. If it were as easy as envy, I would agree. When I stop at windows of Persian rugs in stores I do not enter, I envy the rich whose naked feet walk across the pile and toes are strangled in thick wool shags. When I pause at the gallery of eastern art and smile at the fat bodhisattvas in the window and the Tibetan script, I dart inside, hastily dropping two quarters in the can of crushed twenty dollar bills for the poor of Tibet. I wander aimlessly, the only way to wander, among the rich. When I dream of Italy we are in bed, talking about how we could take a train to France. By coach, Eurorail pass, staying in hostels or with friends we meet on the road who recognize fellow travelers and seekers. We are mercurial, messengers impossible to pin down. We are in the present tense and were never in the past tense, and in the future not tense at all. Our goal is to simply be, and our destination is where we are. Our journey is a memory we haven't yet lived which our intuitions affirm was and will be truly wonderful.

She knows my feelings grew closer when inside, and some will think inside her, and some will better know the inside was a dark place that was yesterday where she was far away outside and all. To a man in rags and foul breath and rotting teeth she gave kindness and called him out like Lazarus from his tomb in stinking rags. Only his dreams were silver and gold and he fancied himself another Count of Monte Cristo in his dungeon cell. At night with a chorus of shades' snoring voices and surrounded by fetid human flesh, dingy sheets of shit and piss, he entered paradise. He entered her consciousness in poems and praise and letters, letters, letters, letters from his own "Four Chambered Heart." When her letters came, she unwrapped the embalming gauze over his blind eyes and through tears of joy he read each delicious word and gazed enamored of every picture she sent, the jewels of children that she taught, the tapestry of faces in the crowd, the chalices filled with the people's tears of the remembered war.

This cannot be me, she must be thinking. What long distance lens did he shoot through the universe like from a spy satellite and see into my heart? How did he reach her psychic nakedness and hear her cries in the night like a wounded animal in the forest? How did his heart stop and die until he was sure they were cries of ecstasy and joy! How did the interrogatory dig so deep it must burst forth in the exclamatory! We question ourselves to death and are born again in the throes of animal orgasm, the way flocks of birds explode from the branches of a river when alligators rush into the water with thrashing tails. A going in and a coming out, a tidal symmetry, how does the dead moon pull our seas, how do our oceans inside rush ashore, how does he know the arcane knowledge of the vagina? How does stardust recall its origin? This cannot be him writing, she must be thinking. He has no crystal ball, no tea leaves; he drinks his cup to the dregs. He employs no spies of love, he acts infuriatingly non-possessive, he flirts with French women and other Latinas. He loves me, she gasps, and doesn't build a cage or pedestal.

The pounding rain is his jazz pouring all over her, streams of white opalescent light still warm from the supernova explosion in some far galaxy, slowly trickling down her sleepless legs restless for dreams to come. And he is her accomplice with snares and high hat, brushing and slapping up and down, cymbal to cymbal smashing, the sticks almost smashing on the sharp rim shots. His hot sticky jazz of blue moonlight left on the tossed sleepless sheets. How does he tie her up in knots that only the nimblest fingers may loose? How does he know?

The rains tell him, she thinks, and then quits thinking and simply...pours.

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