Bronze-by-gold sun on a flint-knife
sculpting obsidian, on the snarl of a god
who eats dead babies. How many
traditions have I invented, and lost
golden ages compelled into
existence to dignify the slow
afternoons sliding into the whims
and anomie of a quarter past four
in Trujillo? Never enough, chronicler-
custodian that I am of these testy late Springs.
Silver-by-tungsten sun on the fork
of a notary eating tripe in the window
of the Simón Bolívar Hotel
and the lazaretto bell chiming the hour.
All that febrile, hurricane year
our pronouns shifted uneasily
under our blistered feet, the dawn’s
first-person Quechua plural
by mid-morning to an imperative
Spanish singular whispered through
the venetian blinds, in whose voice but yours.
Watch for me where your legs await
the moment of ideal length in their shadows,
on the terrace at noon. (Never
have I seen such lovely crossed teeth,
the alpaca thinks of her mate.)
Wait for me where death rolls
the dice and they turn up snake eyes
in the sockets of an old skull
children kick round the graveyard,
tin-miners’ children, their eyes the colour
of pewter, and this is our little apocalypse,
where everything dies and stays just the same.
Our wars of saline inertia, our over-excitable
avant-garde at work on the world’s
first sonnet that is also a grand piano
and sewing machine. When you turned
the key in my office door, I knew
you had come to talk about poems.
Our teeth behind their mumbled syllables
all hope of the coast from these far limits.
Recto and verso, our shores reach
for each other, their dream of meeting
violent as upturned books swept
in a rain of papers from the table
and snapping shut on the floor.