CHE’S BONES/ Jon Hillson

CHE’S BONES

(On the announcement of the discovery of the remains of Ernesto Che Guevara)

Oye Che!

Despiértate!

Wake up, man!

Greet the dawn!

See the world! Finally,

they have revealed where

your smooth, potent bones are buried.

Ya no eres desaparecido no más, hombre!

The unmentionable, secret cemetery

is now known, where you have

shared the earth below the airstrip in Vallegrande

with a quintet of compañeros all these long years,

the chemicals of your cadavers enriching this spot of

America, which could not forever keep mute the place

where the bones of its children – sweet, beautiful bones,

silently unsettled – bid their time, awaiting inevitable disclosure.

Your speechless warrior remains, no longer address unknown,

prove more resilient than the vows of military silence sworn to

by the undertakers of the high command

who watched their hired gravedigger, the elusive Ticona,

excavate a mass tomb with his tractor, warily dump you in,

& flatten the mound with his bulldozer. Bien hecho!

Who will they discover with you, Che,

among these nameless combatientes sharing this

dormitory of worms & loam for decades while all

sorts of helicopters, fighter jets, hovercrafts, cargo planes,

reconnaissance vehicles, WW II training vessels landed

above you, bouncing onto the runway, screeching to a

halt, disgorging fumes, fuel, laughing pilots in their boots,

their chiefs & the troops of the anti-drug terror squads,

marching bands, porcine politicians, you name it, a constant din,

so that even in your covert internment, you could not enjoy

a moment’s peace only a stone’s throw from the Yuro Ravine,

where you were surrounded, pinned down & picked off October 8

28 years ago at Vado del Yeso by crack scouts on the hunt,

equipped with state of the art tracking technology &

directed on the spot by can-do special agents from

the omnipotent northern necropolis, seeking your heat &

determined to extinguish it, by any means necessary.

The rangers first shot your mule, next you, in battle.

Wounded, you returned the fire until a bullet wrecked the

barrel of your M-2 & your pistol had no magazine. The circle

tightened, discovered its quarry, then lined up your bleeding

tropas, demanding the leader be identified & all you said was,

Yo soy Che Guevara. The puffed up victors, alarmed & excited by their

catch of the day, called La Paz for further instructions,

a request conveyed to the very top, to el presidente baboso

Barrientos himself, & from him to his bosses &

from them to theirs & passing thru each way the Man

with the Plan, el gusano famoso, Felix Rodriguez (a.k.a. Ramos).

From on high the order came all the way down the ladder, right to

Sargento Mario Teran, who upon receiving the command got drunk

on warm beer, entered the little schoolroom in La Higuera where

you were held, sitting, your wrists tied, your feet bound,

shod in sandals made of rags, your ears ringing from the shots

that had just wasted Willy & Chino. You watched him try to steady

his carbine without success, until you finally stood & addressed him,

Shoot if you have balls! Shoot!

There you are, in the celebrated grainy photo, flat & thin,

like the proverbial patient etherized on a table,

your head propped up on a stool, your empty eyes half-open,

as if you are in repose, or in contemplation, or getting

ready to read one of the books that you lugged around

in your little army’s library through enervating rain,

thirsty mosquitoes & indifferent jungle. But now,

all sorts of people are pointing at you, at the holes

in your body, the body of Che Guevara,

which would be exhibited later in a hospital laundry, proof

of the victory of the State, the Armed Forces & Law & Order

over Communism & Anarchy epitomized by you, itinerant Argentine,

symbol of continental revolt, protagonist of 2nd & 3rd Vietnams

on America’s spine, not so heroic-looking there at five-feet seven,

skinny & shot up, like Swiss cheese.

Instead, the peasant women came & mistook you

for Jesús Cristo, not only because of the gentle wave of

bedraggled chestnut hair that swept your shoulders, the wanton

beard on your face, the slender frame & pale skin, the aching ribs,

pounded by asthmatic explosions, but for your insurrectional good works,

legendary rectitude & deferential conduct to la gente indígena,

& because you, too, knew the Judasses who betrayed you

with the saccharine smiles of presumed comrades-in-arms &

the abrazos of supposed fraternal partidarios.

O, how the world has changed since those days,

Che! Que cambios! What would you do, see, recognize, remember?

Would you disbelieve, rub your eyes, snicker, guffaw, or simply

puff on your stub of a cigar & express no surprise

at all? Who remembers your alerta?

The temptation is great to follow

the beaten track of material incentive.

There is the danger that the forest

will not be seen for the trees.

The pipe-dream that socialism

can be achieved with the help of

dull instruments left to us by

capitalism can lead to a blind alley

& you wind up there after having

traveled a long distance with many

crossroads & it is hard to find out

just where you took the wrong turn.

Crooked roads have been followed &

when it was decided to refrain from

these roads, other roads were followed

which did not prove to be less crooked

& thus experiments reach a wall

impossible to climb.

Now, like Lazarus, you rise. Your bones, recognizable by

the missing hands

(removed to identify your trophy corpse)

& the astonishing brow of your skull

(the physical embodiment of concentrated thought)

can ascend from the sediment below the airstrip &

come home, your omniscient, impatient bones,

returned to a world which would not faze you at all

– with its debris of decrepit

monuments to nightmare Shangri-Las

(workers’ paradises, evaporated by popular demand),

the spectacle of traditional marketplaces glutted by

overproduction & those of their stillborn would-be disciples

heaped with mountains of malnourished infants,

the breathtaking paroxysms of la bolsa de valores

erupting from the fragile fault lines of big capital’s tectonic plates,

the revival of obsolete maladies, plagues & infections,

the Caligula smiles of the latest generation of snake-oil merchants,

vendors of national patrimony & multilingual salesmen

of old shit in new buckets, the pornographic feats of incredible

weapons systems & their collateral damage,

the wondrous, innovative acts of anti-social behavior-

none of this would shock you, or make your wiser-than-

39-year old bones shudder, or rattle your sleek skeleton

sending you hurriedly back to the subterranean clay of Vallegrande

wrapped in your Che Guevara tee-shirts, shorts, towels, earrings,

ash trays, wall calendars, etc., draped in the creamy accolades

of all those who despise you –

the eight previous occupants & the current tenant of

la casa blanca & his loyal oppositionists,

renascent supposed Bolsheviks in Moscow with their

unslaked thirst for hard currency,

aimless post-Cold War European intellectuals musing

over old, long-lost romances & bitter at failed loves,

aging baby-boomer academics searching for

meaning amidst chaos,

biographers, hagiographers, cinematographers &

other sundry shysters out for the big buck on the

upcoming happy birthday of your death,

grizzled & neophyte hack gringo

journalists with exhausted rumors at discount rates,

aspiring tourist industry moguls in your old stomping grounds,

whose fleeting flirtation with the legal tender of the enemy has

become the latest object of emulation & desire,

& last but not least, anyone,

anywhere with an ax to grind against your once &

still comandante-en-jefe

still garbed in verde olivo

still bearded

still standing &

still itching for

the good fight, preparing

your prodigal’s

homecoming, hardly as final

resting place, but as reveille &

reinforcement.

It is thus no surprise that many sweat to transform you into

something more palatable, a product easier to move, with short

shelf life. A crooner of love songs, philosopher king, chess maven,

aficionado of fine-leaf tobacco, antiquated adventurer,

heroic model for evocative photo-montages, fanatic conspirator,

last of the red-hot revolutionaries, armed existentialist,

relic of lost utopia, mirror image of themselves in their youth, &

their most recently failed project, above all, a blast from the past.

Everything but what you were, are, will always be.

Si, siempre: el Che, communist.

This world would not cause your jaw to drop an inch,

you would welcome it, dive into it, roll up the sleeves

on your firm, unyielding bones & say,

Let’s get to work, comrades! There’s no time to waste!

This is the fear of those who maintain the reins on

your calcified restos, of those to whom they answer,

salute, grovel, who pull their strings & push their buttons,

now fretting again, having thought the whole matter

had been, like your ragged, mortal ass, disposed of,

despite the quaint graffiti carved into the walls of the

now famous laundry

Che you are our light

The road of your struggle is our life

Thanks Che

They worry that these rambunctious bones

resist mummification, becoming a skeletal mannequin

for the latest ideological fashion, bleached, buffed & polished

for public view in el gran show, professorial confab concealing

demolition derby, global flea market of Chemanía.

No, not these bones, not Che’s stainless steel bones,

that all these years later could never be vanished

by those who ordered your death in the first place &

who wish now they had dumped your flaco, red Cuban carcass

into a vat of lye & acid, a cask of radioactive waste,

a pit of mercury, a toilet full of Drano & flushed!

Leaving not a trace of the likes of

Ernesto Che Guevara,

not a follicle of hair,

a thread of uniform,

a splinter of bone,

a cell of DNA. They grate their molars,

curse how they should have vaporized you more

thoroughly than at Hiroshima,

where they left those tell-tale snap-shot

silhouettes on the mushroomed walls of

former buildings, but no,

al contrario!. You & your stoic, demanding, spectral

bones get the last laugh after all – bones reborn

in trenches too many to name, resurrected in Nicaraguan

hills, in Venezuelan jungles, Somali deserts, narrow trails in

the Vietnamese central highlands, massive positional maneuvers on

the plains of Cuito Cuanavale – bones in the bodies of your first pupils,

now generals, who discovered pieces of you in themselves & whose

own apprentices do likewise & thus linked, become the accumulated,

conclusive forensic evidence that they could not kill you,

your bones were never disappeared at all.

Now, they are ready to meet the air, anonymous no longer,

to resume where you left off, Che, unbowed before the last emperors

in their latest duds. IT’S YOU! &

your triumphant, unrepentant bones

that then

as now

always stuck

in their throats.

(On October 17, 1997, after ceremonies marking their death in combat,

the remains of Che Guevara and six comrades – from Bolivia, Simeon Cuba

and Aniceto Reinaga; from Peru, Juan Pablo Chang-Navarro; from Cuba,

Alberto Fernandez Montes de Oca, Rene Martinez Tamayo, and Orlando

Pantoja – were buried in Sanata Clara, Cuba. Initial reports indicated

the discovery of five of Guevara’s co-fighters.)

– Jon Hillson

JON HILLSON is a member of the International Association of Machinists at Los Angeles International Airport, a political activist, journalist and widely published poet.