My Inner Song, Their Outer Petals

A song is baby’s breath, a poem is the beauty of the quetzal.

Songs belong to all of us.

Songs run deep, like our mother Coatlicue’s womb.

Songs travel far, penetrating with pleasure.

But songs are also unknowable, if you craft them as such. Songs are beauty.

Those are the feelings and thoughts that I am humming to myself when my uncle Huitzilopochtli visits me in his hummingbird form. He darts and pokes near a shallow bed of roses near my sanctuary, and I place my focus onto him.

My uncle, so mighty, so swift, he pauses before drinking from a purple rose, and he turns his head. His black eyes shine like orbs made of obsidian.

Sing a song for me Xochitl, he says.

I want to ask my uncle many questions, but since he hardly ever visits me, I know there won’t be too much time for a longer conversation.

I’ll craft a song and a poem for you, I say, but first tell me, why did you break ties with your brother Xipe Totec?

I am prone to asking many questions. Questions that usually start with why.

Huitzilopochtli shifts and molds his hummingbird body into something less solid, into a shimmering light that glistens and glitters. He is angry.  He becomes a beam of light imbued with iridescent shades of jade. His voice sounds exactly like the sounds of waterfalls and volcano eruptions.

Your uncle Xipe deserted me and my brothers, Hutzilopochtli says. He deserted me, Quetzalcoatl and Tezcatlipoca when we fought against the reptilian monster Cipactli, at a time when we needed him most. But there have been other instances, too. When the Big Flood ended the Fourth Sun, and the sky fell onto the Earth, all of us four brothers took on the task of creating trees to prop up the sky, to fix things, to nurture living things. Yet it was Xipe who ridiculed us for wanting to help the humans. He said they deserved nothing. And lately, Xipe uses words as sharp as obsidian blades to talk to us and our parents. His words hurt. And I am tired of feeling hurt. That is why I have shut the doors of my palaces to Xipe Totec. At least for now.

Above us, the sky turns a sickly shade of brown and black, and I can sense that Huitzilopochtli’s anger is brewing, like a steaming bowl of xocolatl, and if spilled, it will scald and burn the skin of any living thing it touches.

And is there any chance you’ll ever make amends, declare a truce with Xipe?, I ask.

My uncle, old as time, but strong and willful, changes back into his hummingbird shape.

He is named Huitzilopochtli, meaning hummingbird on the left side, but just like the rest of my kin, he goes by many other names. Each of us have hundreds names, all of them handed down by our ancestors. I write these names down inside myself, so one day I can sing songs about them.

Huitzilopochtli nods his tiny head, and his beak releases motes of light that gleam like jewels. I sing a short melody, and I start a soft wave of drumming. His rage is diffusing a bit. And yet, he is still thinking the question I asked.

Finally, he speaks again. Me and my brothers will make up, he says, and we will exchange hugs and stories, when Xipe Totec is willing to destroy the house he built. He built a structure that dishonors our parents, Ometeotl and Omecihuatl. It is a house that deviates from the nurturing essence of our mother’s Coatlicue, Tonanzin and Omecihuatl. It’s a bad house. Only after Xipe Totec has sifted through its belongings, and reduced that house to its most essential cosmic parts, that we will have peace as a family, he says.

I don’t truly understand what my uncle means about building a house, but that is normal, because I am young. I have no desire to build anything, ever. All I want to do is dance, sing, drum, and then do it all over again. Instead of building things, I prefer to make flowers grow.

Around us, the mountain landscape blurs, becomes the firmament, and my uncle and I find ourselves moving through another set of wheels, the burning wheels. He is no longer in hummingbird shape. He becomes gigantic and blue, like galaxy swelling to the brim with a type of violence and heat. I gaze at myself, and I too am something different, shaped like a comet and a black hole at the same time. My kin and I also take on multiple shapes, and we all know how to soar through planets and stars.

As my uncle and I glide in the darkness and light of millions of galaxies, I can feel the love of my parents, and I feel sorrow that my four uncles are in conflict. Quetzalcoatl shares my gift and talents for music. Tezcatlipoca knows how to see things inside the other side of a mirror. Huitzilopochtli shares my love of dance, even if his dances are about war and mine are about sex, love and kissing. And my uncle Xipe, I don’t know, he just reminds me of savage flowers that ripen and open in the middle of the jungle in the middle of the night. In that sense, Xipe and I are like mirror images of each other. I think highly of my four uncles, and every time I write songs about them, I see visions of the cosmos in these colors: red, white, blue and black.

Huitzilopochtli and I pull back from the vastness of the night sky and are suddenly back in my mountain world again, and he and I take on the shape of animals, the kind that once existed in the plane of humans, animals from a different time, animals from the first and second sun. And then we shift shape one more time, and I pour my uncle a cup of hot spring water infused with cuetlaxochitl, a flower that grows in plentiful bushes at the foot of the mountain of Tepeyac.

My song is ready, uncle Huitzilopochtli, I say. He nods at me, and I begin to sing, to recite, to bring him the gift of lyric and music. My poetry is always infused with music.

Una Canción Y Un Poema

Yo fuí gotita de rocío en el vientre de mi madre

Me llamo Xochitl

Tengo miles de destinos que radican desde mi centro

La palabra xochitl se puede conectar a otras palabras, tu bien lo sabes

Mi vida: Yo creceré, seré la que le llaman Xochiquetzal

Mi vida: También seré Xochipilli

Los destinos son profecías, son augurios, son libros, son canciones, son poemas

Yo soy estambre, filamento, antera, estigma, estilo, ovario y óvulos

Pero también soy algo màs | algo ocultado, asombroso

Mis descendientes serán como yo: flores, perfumes, colores, canciones, danzas y visiones cósmicas

Me llamo Xochitl, pero tengo cienes de otros nombres. Soy princesa, príncipe, y algo más; algo tercero, cuarto, quinto, y mas profundo

Yo canto y relato la historia de mi familia

Y de vez en cuando, tengo que despertar a mis seres queridos

Con el olor de la flor podrida, con el perfume de la naturaleza muerta

Este olor es el olor del hongo, del árbol putrificado, un apeste llamativo, bendito por mi tía Mictecacíhuatl

Este cosmos es mi casa

En mi casa yo despierto a los que deben levantarse

En esta casa yo vivo como susurro y baile, como fantasma en forma de flor

En esta casa me llaman la señora de las flores

En esta casa también soy el señor de las flores

En esta casa hay secretos, traiciones, asesinatos, fuegos y mucha sangre

Pero en esta casa, bendita por mis flores y mis dones,

En esta casa

Existe

Un càntaro infinito del amor

My uncle Huitzilopochtli takes on a new form as I finish my song. He pirouettes, glides and leaps, and I haven’t seen him so content in a long, long time. His laughter, his joy, they are signs that he is proud of me.

You sing in glory, he says. He takes on a shape that is solid, and he hugs me, with the same power I feel when my own mother and father hug me.

You, my nibling, he tells me, will be a kindness to the humans. You will part many rivers, move many mountains and open hearts with your songs, your voice, your poems, your delicate petals, the millions of colors you produce as Xochitl. You will save many, he says.

Many what?, I ask.

But before my uncle can answer, he is gone, flying through the air, into the sky flying past the moon and grazing the sun. He embodies war, and he will be gone for a long time again, to fight in battles that I would rather turn my back to.

I look down onto my body, and I like what I see. It’s neither stamen nor stigma. It’s everything, it’’s a totality. It’s also something beyond. My body is like the corridors of a labyrinth: tangible and knowable to me, and a bed of millions of flowers for the rest of the cosmos to see, smell and even hear.

Xochitl is my root. What comes next are the eras of the fifth and sixth suns.