Things in Light Poetry Series 2013: Rudolfo Carrillo

There are only a couple of hours left in this year's version of April. We are confident that this iteration will infinitely reprise itself, though our spectral sources say that by 2157, the term "April" will have been replaced by an unpronounceable word that alludes to the majestic heat and windy cruelty of springtime in the northern hemisphere.


In accordance with such glimpses into future astronomical and geophysical possibilities, we are going to wrap up our second annual poetry series with the previously published sonnets of Things in Light co-founder and editor Rudolfo Carrillo, who reminds us that Tlön is closer to becoming than we can possibly imagine.




Sonnet for Amalthea

This ain’t a story built from good wood,

he said, while assembling imaginary

transdimensional super materials

into a fluid as heavy as Jupiter’s third

moon. Besides, the others might

gather together an army of squirrels

or squares. Both are considered good eating,

you know. There are alternatives to dusk

and did I tell you — he continued

in a voice reminiscent of the translucent

utterance ascribed to Zeppo when

confronted by the complexity of it

all — the way ashes cling to water is

just another word for the sky.

Sonnet Comprising Today’s Temporal Analysis



I found out my town was made from dust and corn, street people


and low flying jet aeroplanes. Sometimes an old turbo job swooped into view.


Inside the restaurants, people spoke about how bright the sun had been, whether


or not there would be enough rain to paint the streets with, like it was a holiday or


something like that. Everyone I knew drove a car that spit out smoke while loudly


proclaiming the continued ascendance of heavy metal. The pictures in the local


paper alluded to twisted mulberry branches. If you fashioned a plutonium-laden


symbol from those elemental moments, someone up in heaven would surely


smile at the heaviness that propelled the resulting storm clouds upward into what


could only be described as a fantastically elaborate void. After recording these


latest observations, I drank from the river with the solemnity of Coronado’s


thirsty horde, gamboling fiercely upon the shore, disguised as last month’s


flying insect ruler, conjuring articles of faith from yellow leaves. Sodium


lamps buzzed wantonly from electrified steel poles; it was never quiet here.

Sonnet Sixteen: Saltwater and Smoke

The past, or rather the world created

by expired occurrences and dangling

actions remains out of reach. The

inchoate symphony in everyman’s left eye

is a globe of indeterminate composition

and volume. Arms cannot grasp such

roundly articulate implications. Its girth

is unitary and expansive in directions

previously dismissed as outlandish,

as not befitting the shabby wizardry

defined on a Cartesian plane and

primarily used as a basis for moving

wind-driven, wooden caverns filled with men

and their produce across the vasty deep.

Sonnet After Kilgore Trout



The flattened portion of the universe you are currently viewing

is best displayed through soporific filter number seventy-nine point


sixty-three. You know the one I mean, don’t you, gentle reader?


It resides in a golden box, composing itself from ashes and modern


construction materials like citizenship and looming mortality.


A new tower built of bony fingers with missing legs upon its painted lips.



That form gives a rumbling grandeur to what was poured into it.


Infinity and nothingness make for subtle yet utilitarian hinges.


There is even a subroutine designed to increase the vividness and


the saturation of spring. Subsequently, the summer sun burns hours


into crevices available for entertainment or observation in a manner


similar to the power of photographs prior to their silvery obsolescence.



I have never been more hopeful about America. Smoke a cigarette


and masturbate. Ask your robotic assistant about installation options, today.

Sonnet for Flesh

Now he is mechanical.


and there ain't any music


on the a.m. dial, so you can


forget all about x-rock eighty


motherfucker, reconciling
yourself instead to

murmurs, utterances 
and the urge to catch

one's breath, 
trip trip tripingly, or whatever

else
 floats through the aether to be
 

transformed by magnetism.

Continuing his research on robots


because there are plenty of flash

videos 
that depict men made

from tin,
 he will limit and adjust

his range of motion, accordingly.

Quotations From a Revolution

Thirty years must pass said I,

knowing anyway springtime

could not be properly reckoned

in the rough calculation of

transit. You may visit when

it is convenient. Ah, but remember

to flee spasmodically with the night,

just when the trees flutter and

the birds erupt into their seasonal

songs of temporal location. Until

then, all monuments should be

built from locomotion; a reminder

of what we did to make an

escape from this new rain.

Sonnet for A Passing Vessel

Vast portions of the heavenly void

go unused because performing magic on

carpeted hallways has limitations. Things

are getting lost, and better yet, being revealed;

much like serpentine flashes in the trees,

almost like the time they found a poisonous spider

behind the water cooler. My dreams do not refer to literature.

They do not echo my father’s Quixotic asides.

Or describe everything as backwards. Inside that vessel,

Wave forms do not have emotional content and you

can experience purple in all of its glory, although

the soundtrack is forgettable; composed of bright pixels

that are really grains of rice that are really

bones colored like the contour of a cloud.

***

Rudolfo Carrillo is an artist and writer that lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He studied art at the University of New Mexico. He has been a welder and projectionist, but now works as a college instructor. His work has been published in all sorts of places, but mostly on the web and in newspapers. Interact with his site, Infinity Report, when you have  some time. 

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Your Protagonist's Brief Reverie at Winrock

By Rudolfo Carrillo

"From the outset, let us bring you news of your protagonist."

On the way to Winrock Mall to ransack the bargain racks in the men's building — because they have two buildings at the Dillard's in Burque, one for the men and one for the women — your protagonist cranked up the car stereo and listened to 94 Rock while his wife sang along to the blare of the overly familiar pop-heavy metal songs being offered by a part-time DJ on a sunny Sunday afternoon.

As the non-exiting freeway overpass on Pennsylvania was surmounted and conquered by the ramshackle and mostly reliable Saab 900 Turbo, the ramshackle and mostly abandoned shopping center initially mentioned in this post loomed in the short distance and a song by Ozzy Osborne called Changes drifted with ironical peacefulness (given the singer's oeuvre) through the speakers, briefly causing the driver of the twenty-year-old silvery-gray sports car from northern Europe to lament the death of his dog, whose permanent absence from the earthly realm had coincidentally banished summer from the man's world, because here it was already near the middle of September and he was already shopping for woolen sweaters and hardy shoes and could not remember a goddamn thing that really happened between the beginning of May and the end of August, except for a couple of dreams.

In one of the dreams, your protagonist's dog was happy, living amongst the other grateful doggie dead, while David Foster Wallace oversaw the whole operation and repeatedly enjoined the dreamer to shorten his sentences and to choose his adverbs wisely.

In the other dream, it was already snowing and Burque was still part of Mexico. That was obvious from the shapes of the streets and sidewalks and buildings; the age of the concrete suggested Cortés and Moctezuma mixed up in equal proportions.

But, anyway, at the mall, most of that tragic stuff, those snowy aftermaths was and were sublimated by the totally amazing sale on men's shirts available for consumption by the general public and especially those seeking drastic reductions with just a hint of aging hipster fashion sense thrown in for good measure.

One of the salesmen wore a striped bowtie knotted in the traditional manner, imperfect and just madly droopy on the left side. Everybody with a nametag wanted to help out; can I help you find something in your size or are you ready to check out, they all said with pearly smiles.

On the way outta there, two French pullovers and one worsted wool set of trousers later, our protagonist and his lovely, brilliant, life-saving and totally the only person in the world even remotely capable of dealing with the sky-larking, Swiss cheese-brained, mournfully snarky and heroically underachieving alien-hybird that is, in essence, your protagonist, zipped along the perimeter of the once glorious Winrock Mall. Some construction company or other was tearing parts of the old place into shreds, carting portions of the lonesome asphalt parking lot over to huge rubbish bins. Only three of the ancient, nineteen-sixties Native American-art influenced parking lot signs remained standing: the one for clouds, the second for comets, and the third for rain.

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Aqui, Ahora, a Total Color

by Rudolfo Carrillo


While standing in the queue for the payment kiosk at ghetto Smiths bright and shiny new fuel depot attachment, a fellow with tiny eyes and sharp vocal articulation comes up to me and says "where the hell is the clerk", and "don't tell me they are starting this bullshit again". So, I smile and look up at him because I have been gazing deeply into the sunny reflection coming from my shiny leather shoes. He repeats himself and so I tell him the clerk is  probably showing one of the customers how to pump gas or something like that. The guy tells me he hates New Mexico and that stuff like the missing cashier is why he moved away fifteen years ago, but then finishes off by saying he has come back for a year to teach a course over at the university. I go back to shoe-gazing and the clerk ultimately ambles back into the booth, smelling of gasoline and low wages.


After I pay my seven bucks for about two gallons of gas, I tell the man behind me to have a nice day. He is so busy arguing with the clerk that he probably doesn't hear me.


I didn't think much of it, except I thought the story might make a good introduction for another post about my experience of events while living in Burque. Of course I'd probably come up with some abstruse way of putting that out to you, like pretending, for instance that I am some sort of emissary from another world, downloading data to the robots or colonists or whatever fictive beings I could come up with, in order to spice up the story. 


Anyhow, this sort of device is just what I came up with with regards to the past.


Listen up and draw yourselves to the fire for these words, pilgrims because the way I spill them out into the air and onto the page will one day be described as part of a great confluence of data transmission protocols originating on the planet earth and produced by fragile, flesh-bound beings whose various constructions survived their incorporation as individual biological units. This is part of what will inevitably be left behind. Though there is no permanent record of its passage through your optic nerve and into the universe that you are bound to with water and carbon, its potential to be assimilated, decoded and analyzed by other entities, even billions of years from now, has quantum possibilities.


To further investigate this phenomena, I jumped back to a sub-location in the aforementioned spacial membrane. Called nineteen-seventy five by the beings passing through it, the place is rich with data sources.


At our primary research station, deep at the bottom of the Rio Grande, at the research and colonization center described in a previous iteration of this report, I happened upon the following recorded fragment of an electromagnetic broadcast. For research purposes, it has been uploaded to devices common in the current temporal location, as many of my associates still have not updated their terminals to include basic reverse time-travel apps (damn imperial bureaucracy).

After rigorous analysis of this artifact, I have decided to elucidate my findings using the linguistic structures common to our subjects.


I love New Mexico, this is one of the reasons I stay here. Es la neta.


End Transmission.

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A Selection From the Wide Valley of Hope and Order

by Rudolfo Carrillo


As it turns out, the history of this state, even rendered and distilled into an extra-complex and viscous fluid of strategies as I have previously employed here, is dang popular. People like to read about stuff that happened to people who came out onto the earth in these parts before we were around.

With that concept in mind I turned the wheels in my head loose, locating all the odd stories that I heard from my old man and his kin, plus the stuff I experienced here, so far, myself.
Rambly as all of that may be - and it may get that way on purpose, just to swirl you around into all the different worlds and different places that I can construct with a finite set of alphanumeric characters - its mostly stuff that really happened.

Combined with an embedded set of ideas in each of my readers' heads about how to decode and organize those text-strings, the result, as any carnival barker will tell you, is to inform, amuse and perplex. It is no joke that I hope you all get something close to magic from said interaction.

So I am going to start with nineteen forty-five and wind my may through to the summer of nineteen seventy-five, before I drop you off somewhere about Christmastime, nineteen ninety-five.

After the war was done my father and his brother, their cousins who lived, and the friends who they grew up with, came home to Las Cruces. Even the ones lucky enough to be physically whole had been changed; whatever came before seemed ghostly and unkempt. Now they were thin restless souls returned to the desert, to a place of elusive order where some plants took forty years to bloom.

Men like this were scattered through New Mexico like the seeds of a new commodity, each mixed thoroughly into the rich soil of rediscovered locality and regional potential. Their assimilation into american culture and the economic success such entailed was anxiously informed by the military culture they brought back to reside with them in their flinty and orderly hearts. It was in the quick cinderblock ranchitos that appeared with waxen spontaneity on the edge of town; it was in the smooth concrete, built up from the sand next door and the river down below - deposited lovingly, but certainly as an intricate cover too - masking what remained of the past, dry and crummy as it was, had been, or was imagined to be.

There were demonstrations of American exceptionalism and what had been woven into their wartime souls poured out into their lives on the mesa. On more than one occasion, they trucked in trees from California and the new vegetative entities bloomed and otherwise professed greenness and fruition all damn year long.

Along the northern passage and in the midst of la jornada del muerto, immense reservoirs had been constructed so that once abandoned nautical fantasies could be pleasantly revisited, every weekend, ad infinitum. From those driftingly buoyant castles, they dreamt of Burque. To my people that place danced on the horizon like a daikini possessed by an atomic grandeur that could only possibly yield meaning through communion.

Assuming the measure of control desired and to some degree attained by the post-war prodigals, it is a wonder that any chaos crept out of all that beauty and strength and yearning, to walk down the bright boulevards and through the tamed tropical replicas, howling and mournful, as misadventure is wont to do.

But that's what this story is all about, now that I come to think on it.

You see my folks weren't the first to creep hopefully and by moonlight towards the fabled and fabulously well-to-do El Norte.

My old man 's sister Cuca married a restless and pugnacious state cop named Robert Gilliland. They settled in the northeast heights during the mid nineteen sixties. Their kids went to Sandia High. We were there too, mostly on the weekends, staring out at the arcadian world which surrounded them, gracefully and efficiently.

By the time the decade turned, Gilliland had grown disenchanted with the kind of law enforcement that happened along the state's highways. He retired honorably and bought a restaurant in Corrales.

The place was called the Territorial House. Besides the full-on biker bar that sat on the corner of the lot, the property had a notorious reputation. Two men had died there in a gun battle back in 1898. The cottonwood in front by the road was well-known to old-timers as a hanging sort of tree.

But the place was successful; Robert and his business partner, Monie Sanchez, ran a tight ship, pouring their restive hearts into it every night, dreaming by day of controlling this world and that one.

In the summer of nineteen hundred and seventy-five, two men entered that bar I told you about. Some say they came to rob, others said their motives were more vengeful and complex than that. In any case, gunfire erupted while Sanchez was at the cash register and my uncle was in a back room. The assailants fled from the critically wounded man, but were unusually calm and collected, walking back to their car in the parking lot, unaware of Gilliland, who grabbed a shotgun from under the counter, followed the men out and shot them to death where they stood, with the engine running and the AM radio blaring.

Robert Gilliland walked inside and called the police. Then, he dialed up my old man and breathlessly told him everything before he collapsed on the floor and died of a massive heart attack.

Twenty years later, when I was working a slacker job at an art supply shop in Nob Hill, the boss chose the Territorial House for the company Christmas dinner. At the time, the joint was called Rancho de Corrales, but the bar was still there, the tree, too. I took my brother along and we were both mighty uncomfortable during the proceedings.  The fellow that ran the art shop, Ernie, was just as confused as could be about all that, especially when all we could do was mumble about how clean and organized the whole place seemed to be. Sure, there were ghosts lurking there, but you wouldn't a known it by the way the art store people carried on that night.

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