The old woman stares out an open window,
shards of sunlight pierce her face
cutting shadows on skin. She is washing
her hands after the dishes, dipping them
into a sea of hues and shapes,
a sea of syllables without sound,
in a stone house in Mérida,
her Mérida of dense Mexico.
The water is a view to a distant place:
Kitchen walls fall to reveal a gray sky,
an array of birds in flight through fog
—the crushed white of waves curling at feet.
There appears a woman in forested hair,
eyes of black pearl,
who touches the hewn face of a man
and palms that feel like bark.
She cringes at its blemishes
and something in her careens
against the walls of her heart.
She never wants to let go,
never wants to stop tracing
the scars above his eyebrows,
the tattoos on blackened skin,
while the lick of a tongue
stirs the night inside her.
The old woman looks at water and into
this vision shaped into a mouth
—the mouth of the sea that swallowed
her sailor-husband
so many sunlit windows ago.