Cutting the Wire

Photographs and Poetry from the US-Mexico Border

Bruce Berman, Ray Gonzalez, Lawrence Welsh, Lisa McNiel

• Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780826359018
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

Cutting the Wire, a masterful collaboration between photographer Bruce Berman and poets Ray Gonzalez and Lawrence Welsh, offers us a way to look again, to really look, at the border between Mexico and the United States. Berman, who has photographed and lived in El Paso for decades, is a documentarian who uses his camera to record what's in front of him rather than for, as he puts it, "mere self-expression." Berman's visual investigations of the everyday realities of the border—detention centers, smeltertown cemeteries, kids playing along a river levee, descanso crosses on telephone poles for the disappeared—are exactly the stuff the poetry of Gonzalez and Welsh is made of. The multilayered histories of the border landscape provide an inexhaustible supply of rich and fertile raw material for both Gonzalez and Welsh. But their poetic visions allow them to capture elements of a personal and collective past that historians have often failed to record.

BRUCE BERMAN AND RAY GONZALEZ

It Should Have Happened Long Ago

I return to El Paso often.

It must be the river and the cross on the peak.

The sun withers in clouds like men careful

in stepping through the back door.

I remove the stone step.

In my father’s house, a strange woman.

Inside my mother’s walls, a white sheet,

and a globe of the earth in a photograph.

Let those who favor mystery speak.

It is the stone step where a boy fell.

In my home, books collect dust.

On the mountain wall, a painted red hand.

El Paso

You have another dreaded hometown dream where everything has changed and the buildings you fear entering might set off a nightmare to wake you. This time, the streets are brilliant and your grandmother’s ghost walks with you downtown. You cross the main street and stare at tall buildings that weren’t there when you were growing up, your invisible grandmother following you as you cross to San Jacinto Plaza. Instead of the fountain where they kept alligators, there are old men in sombreros taking a siesta under the trees. You are disappointed because it is the midday nap of stereotype, the poor Mexicans doing nothing but sleeping. “I thought everything had changed,” you mumble in your sleep. Your grandmother gives the men fresh stacks of homemade tortillas, masa patted and cooked on her stove in her house, the flames the same fire that appears each time you dream, the old men in their sombreros waking up to eat and stare at you. Each one shakes his head at you as your grandmother disappears beyond the river where a town of empty houses waits for her, but that is not part of your dream.

Guadalupe #5. Lower Valley, El Paso, Texas, 2003.

The Fingers Light the Western Stars

The Milky Way was crossed by

a streaking satellite on its path

beyond Ursa Major, the galaxy

above the cemetery at Cloride,

where graves hold families killed

by Apaches in the Gila, the great

Andromeda constellation Kenneth

Rexroth worshipped vanishing

beyond the mountains above

the mining town.

The last time I climbed here,

Mr. Clarke was ninety-eight years old, toothless

and proud, the last survivor of a Cloride

mining family, his parents killed by

a tribe, their bodies taken to punish

him for staying alive.

The cemetery protects its names

as it releases distant planets that

are treeless as they go by in sleep,

names in the sky draping myths

around my intrusion, pines and

salt cedars covering the path.

There were clusters of stars

Mr. Clarke couldn’t see when

we looked up and guessed.

He pointed at constellations that

he said never lie, the old man

wheezing to death three years later,

becoming the light in space

that falls in the desert each time

the stars are correctly identified.

The Star of Marfa. Marfa, Texas, 2007.

The Brickmaker / El Ladrillero. Juárez, Mexico, 1986.

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Editor’s Note
• Introduction
• Bruce Berman and Ray Gonzalez
• Bruce Berman and Lawrence Welsh
• Contributors