Untitled - CSUN ScholarWorks - California State University, Northridge

44
Sitting in the Circle
This man with the wild hair, every morning he sits in
the plaza staring into something, staring into space. His
hair, it is his hair I see, a black contagion of curls and knots
and wild thunder tumbling around his head. The inside of
his mind may look like this, a maze of dark contradiction
and haphazard disengagement. But I think not, for after the
hair I notice something else, the distance, the concentration
congealing around him like a halo. Even at the beginning, I
know he is going to disappear.
The man with the wild hair is not like the man with
the newspaper and cigarettes, who also sits in the plaza
every morning. The man with the wild hair is not like the
man with the sombrero and orange shirt and black rubber
boots, who sweeps and rakes and gathers dead blooms in
his plastic wheelbarrow with workman's pride.
No, the man with the wild hair is going somewhere,
sinking into the worn bricks of Olvera Street, the place the
pobladores made for themselves out of sand and sweat and
straw. He is silent and within himself, the cable that
connects him to this world frayed with tension. Junipero
Serra and King Juan Carlos beckon him. He will go. He will
go.
His expression is fixed. He is like the bronze statues.
Covering him every day are the same clothes; dirt of
centuries ground into twill pants that are an indeterminable
shade of grey, a dark blue jacket that gathers around his
considerable bulk, dusty brown boots. His clothes could be
from any time. They say he was a farm worker. He is big,
maybe muscular under the baggy clothes, too big for an
Incan or Aztec. No, he is mestizo, the strains of pounding
drums and silver-clad vaqueros battling for dominance in
his inner vessels. His body is used to work, tilling and
planting and picking. He gathers its forces.
mmmmmm