|
Pieces of Eight
Across the Pampas more enormous
than insomnia, the gaucho riding through nights. Dawn empty bottles, dusk cigarettes half stubbed out. Difficult to tell the difference between asleep and awake often as not to know what to make of the dazzling spaces, murky water, this reasonable air. The church bells, the clocks, the trees were all part of the loot. The Sundays. The Andes. Processions and litanies. Country lanes. Plazas and rivers. More possibilities even than the Mexican Revolution living here in the space between parentheses. What’s all that blood doing on the street? ¡Dios mío! What a careless lot. Here’s a bucket. Here’s a mop. For watermelon boy, neither moonstruck nor drugged, and the beggar waiting for angelic messages admitted through the static of desperation, and deaf mute blind state of the state, and The United States poking around as usual. Thieves steal six minutes on an unfinished canvas, windmills burning in the background. Perhaps the native vultures, soundless and high above, were always destined for this. Smelted far below, this gold has passed through the hands of slaves and their owners, of real-life pirates. It’s crossed broken seas, and been stolen by and from traders, gambled by drunkards, come and gone until I found it there, in the sand, on the opposite beach.
|