Dream Loops
She watched the women bend the supple maguey fibers and slip the ends through loops. She watched their fingers in their complicated knowing dance moving towards a finished rounded form. Freed from the stable at the racetrack where she’d been interned by her own government, her flight found a home in a southern state with renegade artists from Germany. She found a teacher whose goal was to “open eyes,” to know what you’re seeing. A teacher who said that color deceives continually. A teacher who insisted that vision meant imagining, seeing your fantasy through. Don’t take things for granted. Open your eyes. See in a deep kind of way.
Making loops over and under. Tear asunder. Grab the end and pass it through. Til the daylight shows. Mark the spot and start again. Over and under over and under. Crawling through thunder. Growl and groan. Start over again. Again and again. Crawl on your belly through the Darien Gap. Present your papers on demand. Search out the app. Tap the icon. Every day a new wait. Will a date present itself. Will you have a chance. They’re gathering from Uganda and Afghanistan, from Guatemala and Venezuela. They’re playing by the rules but the rules are changing. There are no more rules. The stamp on the visa means nothing. Will there be a date. Will the app work. Every day. They aim their cell phones towards the country of their supposed salvation.
My grandmother too waited for a stamp on her visa. Every day, she stood in line at the Belgian Legation in Warsaw. She was fleeing revolution, civil war. Her young son, my father, and her young daughter, my aunt, waited for her in a room on Muranowska Street. My grandmother had stitched a small muslin bag and filled it with gold coins. My aunt Ruth wore that bag on a string around her slender neck. On my grandmother’s passport it was written: citizen of the former Russian empire. She was stateless.
When empires collapse. When countries imprison their citizens. When nimble hands create containers for dreams. When dreams collapse. A woman in a shelter in Juarez, tearing her hair out. Wailing. They’ve been waiting for entry. A chance to tell their stories. They’ve been playing by the rules. The rules are suspended, ended. There is no going back there is only going forward and forward is blocked by men holding guns.
The artist kept bending those wires opening into new forms, new volumes which contained other volumes and within those, new dreams.