‘Do you know what it is to be touched
by a human being?’ – Anai's Nin
Out of the mouth of darkness
the rain's glass teeth
shatter on the tiles.
There is no one here but myself
(the train station past midnight:
belly of gnawed cigarette butts,
shuddering newspapers,
lustrous signatures of spittle)
And a small animal curled under a bench
(a million feet have touched here
and a million feet have blinked
away from what they've seen)
When will the train come?
From its ragged snare of bones, I know
she's wounded, easier to kill than to save.
She begins to shake.
With my warm eyes, I prod her awake.
She crawls out in a flood of hair.
A cat? A crippled dog?
She whines words I do not know
navaja navaja
Her eyes are human enough
but my vocabulary is deficient.
I am only waiting for the train to come.
When the last of the line arrives
my hands are numb.
The stray chatters, chews at her wrist-bone.
Like a night-scatter of clothes,
(soiled shirt, stinking slips of cloth,
necessary filth)
I lift her tattered bag of skin.
Inside the train, her body falls fluid,
pliant as a fresh-shot rabbit,
she slides off the seat,
curls up, head hooded with hands,
far and safe from my feet.
A mangy flock of men gaze at us,
each one drunk, each one
a hard-mouthed goat.
Navajo? Perhaps it is her name.
* * * * *
In my house, there is one narrow bed.
Like a dog, she sleeps on the floor beside it.
I am too young to be her mother,
but she is a daughter
who has bad dreams.
When her body dries, it is a breathing crow's nest.
Her eyes glisten like two of those hungry birds.
For the first week, she will only say
My name is Amaya
I am too thin.
But Amaya cannot eat.
She sucks at a glass of thick juice,
fears the hard red apples,
the great hearts of vegetables.
You eat those? she whispers, cringing.
Yes, Amaya. Those are carrots.
At night I lie awake as Amaya wrestles
the starving blue snakes in her body.
She narrates her battles to the darkness.
I keep a dictionary beside me and loose my fingers
after her strange words.
Navaja, from the train station, is a switchblade.
Jeringuilla is a syringe.
Bicho is a small animal, snake, or maggot.
Amaya is my teacher of graceless phrases.
Once, leaning on an elbow, looking down
at her blanched and crooked face, I heard a ghost.
I've never seen one, but I felt one's voice
shiver up to my shoulders:
it was the shadow of a child in song.
That night, Amaya grew a pink flower of a tongue
and tossed its petals in the air.
Her flesh tongue is moth-eaten,
nicked by a needle, a scrap
of red silk pricked with holes too rotten
to soak up the soft cotton insides of bread.
Like all miracles, Amaya must be witnessed
or she would not exist.
She subsists solely on water and egg-whites,
drawing a skim of strength
that will freeze and shatter
in winter's gaunt jaws.
The ice here does not harden outside.
It grows wetly in houses, on floors, between sheets.
Winter in any land is a season of failing.
Only this rain remains faithful.
Only the clouds have great integrity.
They drain themselves to stillness.
I hoard my thick blood, though,
and urge the girl to go.
Sometimes she does not wake.
I step over her head in the morning.
She can sleep whole days while her heart
plaits and unplaits its own death.
I wait for her to steal from me, or drown her veins
in one last rush, the ecstatic flush down the needle.
But Amaya doesn't die here.
The day before she disappears
she cleans the house with a brittle sorrow,
the way you clean the cupboard of someone
who has loved you
but died.
She scratches her knees, bangs her shins.
She cracks the mirror, leaves drawers open,
knots undone, the bucket unemptied.
That is why I will never kill myself,
she laughs.
I can never finish the work.
Look, she says, loo at these,
cicatrices.
Beneath bracelets and leather, the scrawl
of two red scars.
The next morning, Amaya is not beside me.
I find a trail of feathers and bits of fur.
The dirty water sours in its bucket.
She scurries into the spider-streets,
coughs and greets the granite ribs of winter.
I did not stop her.
I did not say goodbye.
I was asleep.
Very quickly the dirty water begins to rot.
It might never have been clean.
During a storm, I pour it from a window,
watch it search out a gutter
like a gray-shedding snake.
The cracked mirror remains though.
I grow accustomed to seeing my cleft face.