Almafra hasn't changed much since your death. The listlessness
of aging whores languishing below the crumbled archways.

Each hate, each pair of shoes and every hanging necktie mute
in each shop window and the paintings in the churches all

too somber: the colors of smeared feces. At five o'clock
the downtown streets are swarmed by the rush and flow

of trench coat shadows. While outside the commuter's harbor
another lonely line of humanity waits to be ferried across

the river. For an hour I sat in your favorite café, staring
past your handsome statue. The site of your immortal brain

is now a resting place for pigeons. I have one day remaining
in Lisbon, time enough to visit the carriage museum and

another gaudy palace. I can't speak a word of Portuguese.
I have not said a word to anyone today, and no one yet

has spoken to me. I lack fluency, though for moments,
I hoped a downtrodden, beautiful stranger might approach

and notice my head buried in your selected verse. But no,
the only hands that touched my hands, wanted money.
 
 

Water and the Glass that Contains It

I am only other when I am myself, my acts are more my own when they are everybody because to be myself I must be other, go out of myself, seek my  self among others.
—Octavio Paz

About the Hours

For twenty miles of dirt road we followed the sugarcane tractors.
Wilted cornstalks in April heat. A young mother with a pail on one arm
and a newborn in the other. Swidden field in the distance billowing
bluish smoke. The tour bus pulled up to a dingy cantina. Rhythem
of a woman's hands stacking fresh tortillas. Sun-drained, parched,
a slowness had entered us and it didn't matter anymore about the hourss.
 

Tin Bells

Outside the sugar factory a schoolboy guides a rusted
bicycle by the handlebars past four slim, mustachioed men

walking with machetes at their sides. On the tour bus
I overhear on American say to another: There

are no signs here. How can anyone ever find their way.
Noontime carries the echoes of bells and the shadows of insects

circumscribed by silence. Sunlight in the eyes
of two stone horses each with its headless rider.
 

Los Angelitios

The infant coffins on display in Catemaco
are empty, thank God.
But you must know my friend that children die here.

Limes, red chiles, oranges and corn, the river
and the well, her eyes
and the clover honey gathered there.

On a brittle wall the faded words: Los Manos
De Ressurection, The task,
the casket dealer told me, is to live as if

already in the afterlife.
Little coffin, little tomb-boat,
even without wind or water, each of us is ferried away.
 

Snapshot

Procession of slow moving donkeys, saddlebags loaded with ripened corn.
Rice seed and black wands of sugarcane scattered
on the roads.

Again the dust—inhaled, tasted, settled on the wide mosaic of pores,
the mud walls crumbling and fallen. Townsfolk
coming and going

from the market before dark with their tamarind candies and dolls of felt
and straw. Factory workers, friends and strangers,
young lovers, and a bus

load of gringos hoping for a perfect snapshot…Soon the merchants
will pack up and depart with their burlap sacks
of garlic and peanuts,

leaving the plaza empty. For the moment though, it's impossible to forget
the sound of one's own vanishing, a lantern blown out
before sleep.
 

Mexican Cemetary

I came upon white towers in the city of the dead:
wreaths, lavish bows and tattered lace, red plastic roses
overturned among the weeds,
    ponderous headstones
of cement cooling in the banyan shadows. A child's
pink church dress, hanging, by itself on a clothesline.
 

Little Prayer

Virgin of the Weeping Corn,
Madonna of the Buried Newborn,

Take me
famished as I am

for your turquoise breasts,
for your bleeding doves.
 

Sugarsmoke

Beyond Los Mangos, warm breezes fragrant with burnt
sugarcane, the russet of long drought. Onion vendors lining

the market road. Gold and purple onions, their skins white
as parchment, white as the Anglo body. Her spare and simple room:

two plastic chairs, a kettle and a table, a cot and a calendar
tacked to the wall with a painting of the resurrection.

Remedios, her hair unpinned, torrential, blacker than frijoles.
The sound of her hairbrucsh over and over like the sea.

I was quiet, but wanted to cry: let drown beneath you.
 

Vessel with Painted Aztec Warriors

Empty me
that I may be

simply

eyes that glaze upon the work
with love.