It’s late afternoon and the market looks like a used-car lot.
I watch men conduct business from the backs of their trucks;
there’s not much on sale today: spices, pots, bags of nuts,
cracked ceramic ashtrays. A few customers stroll by,
but it’s too muggy to haggle. The sleepiness of the place
is broken only by the stinging, oddly invigorating smell
of diesel in the air. The port lies just a short distance from here,
and the ships on the horizon rise and dip like the humps
of a great caravan of steel, slowly winding its way
from the West to the Rest. An entire country
is being built from scratch: there are cargo containers
as far as the eye can see. The sun sets, while the market
grows ever more deserted, as if it were the ragged
rear-guard of the past, or an inscrutable prototype of the future.