Waking the Dead: Exploring Mexican and Arctic Spaces

Abstract

I am writing this in Mexico, on the shore of Lake Chapala. The flowers here are foreign, even the ones I’m familiar with. Poinsettias are the size of trees. The weather never changes; opaque air that drifts south from Guadalajara is lifted by the burning hills around the lake to become an iridescent blue. Sunlight scours tumultuous landscape in the distance, and sun-drawn shadows etch gullies on the closer hills, like vein-marks on the underside of desiccated leather. Mimosa and spirea grow wild against adobe ruins above La Canacinta and near the receding waters of the lake the garden flowers loom so high that you can see them shadowing the houses, behind walls, as you walk the narrow roadways to Ajijic, or as you run along the dry mud flats, looking north. I am thinking of the Arctic.