A piece inspired by seeing Yo Yo Ma’s Spring 2019 performance at the Mexico-US border in Laredo. Written during a brief episode of lexical-gustatory synesthesia.
La placer por la presencia de Yo-Yo-Ma
This sentence tastes like a milkshake; it flows playful down the tongue
The way water and children descend slides
Chocolate milk, foamy cream have the same taste; and so does la orilla de Juarez, but less airy.
How I imagine the futuristic ice cream they sell at waterparks—the stuff we could never afford—would taste.
Miracle dots that pop in your mouth and taste of the aether.
Borders everywhere but he dances across the edges
Leaping between marina and marina, an explorer moving between port and port
La greca conquest-established now at “peace” with people settled but restless
La frontera, la necessita para bordear todo — the way we must always wrap up and nothing:
His glasses encircle his eyes like the line around zero encircles Nothing.
Even our ineffable eyes must bordered by frames, even emptiness must be bounded by the line around 0.
We call them “states of being.” There are no states of Being.
Must Being itself be a state, a territory with borders enforced?
Thus we resist when we cross from one state to another, from sadness to anger, from fear to happiness;
But Being is boundless, unwrappable, unbridled, not bordered
Yet our internal border-guards and surveillance cameras ensure
we are panopticoned; we cannot move between them with fluidity and will.
Can we imagine the change if we erased these internal lines?
The absurd theatrical rigor of any border:
watching for, defending against, migrations between states.
As futile as a beach protecting itself from sand.
But how can we resist the border? Not with violence but play.
Like the cellist as the ballerina of la bambelina
¿Perra que pensaste la frontera, la arriate son fáctico?
His bow plays with the stiffness of the cello
Just as a free mind plays with the rigidity of the border.
Fitting the cell-strings align parallel with bars of the fence behind him
Of course the taught hairs strung along the bar his virtuoso explores
Should align with the horizontal bars of the fence.
Violin strings intertwining two cities: two sets of strings
The way a migrant crosses through a fence
His bowstrings cross the neck and fingerboard,
Lines against lines—
border lines vs road lines, bridge lines vs wall lines, fence lines vs violin lines.
Lines upon lines, alignments upon alignments.
To play with a violin is to play between borders,
To cross the border between the bow and the strings endless times.
Cellist and Ballerina: coincidence that the two lines of those words
Imitate the lines of a fence? Collision between horizontal and vertical.
Both have the same purpose: freeing us from cells and borders.
The horizontal, flat, parallel-with-the-dirt motion of the cello bow
Crossing with the cello itself, sliding across the vertical towards-the-sky,
Ending in the gnarled deadal of the wood scroll
His bow is like a train, turned sideways, careening off track
Spark-flying wheels screeching against rails, ignoring their neat rows
Playing chaos itself, anarchic disrespect for The Grid,
but matches it with calmness–An elegant bridge of cello
gently spanning the abyss between drawn lines.
A never-ending Tale of Two Cities: los dos Laredos.
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