The conditions of the solitary bird are five
The first, that it fly to the highest point;
The second, that it does not suffer for company
not even of its own kind;
The third, that it aims its beak to the skies;
The fourth, that it does not have a definite color,
The fifth, that it sings very softly.
These are the qualities the contemplative soul must possess.
it must sing softly for its beloved.
— from “Sayings of Light and Love,” Saint John of the Cross
Sor Juana de la Cruz–the New World Phoenix,
the Tenth Muse the Spanish called her,
a hundred and fifty years before Zorro’s
old California Fandango, not at her lectern
staring out, framed, from the Mexican Baroque
in the portrait by Miguel Cabrera,
but pressing her lips on the stone sundial
of the convent of San Jeronimo, writing sonnets
by the floating gardens of Tenotchitlan.
“Shadow of joy, illusion of enchantment…she wrote,
My arms, my breast, have lost you forever,
but you are a prisoner of my fantasy.”
Carnations bloomed in her palms, her face
glows in a wimpled ring around the moon.
***
At seven in her grandfather’s library,
Juana cropped her hair to four fingers breadth.
She promised herself she’d learn Latin
before it grew in, because “ a head
shouldn’t be adorned with hair and naked of learning .”
The ceiling spread into the sky,
in a thrumming, rush and beat, the letters,
words fluttered from the page.
Books flushed from the shelves wheeling
in veronicas that became stars,
constellations, distilled into “rivers of shining milk,”
“Que las estrellas compogan las silabas,” she later wrote.
“May syllables be composed by the stars.”
Let me disabuse you of the myths.
Before the cloistered nunnery she moved like a galleon
through the whispers and currents of the Viceroy’s court,
where the young men flirted through mirrored
conceits and gambits, the emblems of gesture.
Serious attachments, lovers, another woman—
Yes–perhaps, but the muse of mind was her consort,
her most beloved.
Birds of indefinite color can hide in the light,
but what would the daughter of a good family do,
who wants more than to breed or glitter?
The Marquise de Mancera, the Viceroy’s wife,
ransoms your future, Juana,
a nuptial dowry to mother church,
three thousand gold pesos of manumission,
and you are pregnant with yourself.
The daughter of unborn years,
nestles in San Jeronimo’s gardens,
as free as a woman can be in those days
with the immaculate cord of conception still
wrapped around her waist.
At twenty you read between the lines
of John of Nikiu’s brittle chronicle,
the apochryphal version of Hypatia’s death,
as I read between the lines of your sonnets.
You do not imagine the Archbishop ten years from now,
pressing his seal into the puddling wax,
or hear his purple silk glove drop.
For now no shorn and barefoot sisters under starlight
circling in confession, no thorn scourge.
Your cloister is not a place of hair-shirts, bread and water.
The lay sisters gather like swans in your parlor.
They dance their fathers’ golden pesos
to the gigue and pavan, of your harpsichord.
You have three servants, four thousand books,
telescopes, jeweled seashells, the avis rara’s colored feathers,
you run the convent treasury, make wise personal investments.
The light refracts into fourteen rays
as your parlor revolves into facets of polyphony
that split and shift like Pelastrina’s crystal descants,
to become one of your poems,
that touches us like the phases of the moon
in the voice of the Canto Jondo.
You imagine throwing lemons in a pond
and turning it to silver, a mirrored stillness,
that you read and translate, and transpose into music
in the parlor of your imagination.
******
Cloistered tapping in the catacombs, Juana,
currents of whispers over stone, after the vespers.
Love under will.
Your songs will be muted under glass in the catacombs,
sealed like the sibyl’s voice in jars of olive oil and honey,
for daughters of unborn years.
the Viceroy leaves, and without his protection,
they pin you in the twin lights of fiat and auto da fe
and run you to ground, for sins of the imagination.
Antonio Miranda, your confessor, betrays you,
makes public your private letters,
leaves you in the crossfire of pomp and circumstance,
in the light you can’t hide from,
a light you can’t hide in any longer.
Why should it matter? How could we know
the census of the City of God?
If Christ ever laughed or smiled?
if he washed his disciples’ feet, for pure love’s sake,
the love that does not seek cause and effect,
or, as you argued, for the love of humanity?
Are the gifts of divine love the gifts he does not grant us–
negative benefactions? What merit to the Archbishop’s
pious exactions? Thalamus or Agape,
The evening or the morning star.
No Juana, to have the stars compose sonnets,
to bathe them in rivers of shining milk as you do,
is not a gift of God, but the devil’s temptation.
Abandon the prideful sitting rooms, they tell you,
the four thousand books, the gigues and pavans.
They hunt you like the colored bird and wrap
your words around your neck.
******
You press against the walls, Juana
as the adobe and the stones close in
to squeeze your days and your hours.
You write a silence finally, a voice between the lines,
where none of the Bishop’s violet eyes can follow.
You compress your world into poems you can hide in,
acorns in the convent garden, loaded with the future,
the children of your unborn years.
______________
Canto jondo: The “Deep Song,” Predecessor to Flamenco