If I put my finger gently
On your lips,
Letting it slip slowly along
The moist arc of your mouth,
Back and forth,
What would you do?
If my foot found
Your bare ankle,
My skin on your skin,
Searching your smooth calf
For that moment
Behind your knee,
Breathless and imminent,
With one last question,
How would you answer?
Would you collapse this thin field
Wrapping round us
With childlike arms,
Leaving me desolate
And stripped of cosmology?
Or would you sigh,
And turn,
Bringing yourself
To where I wait in the dark wood,
Everything forbidden
Falling away like leaves
With fall’s first breath.
I saw an old friend yesterday,
A farmer,
Still wrapped
In his family’s stubborn land,
Cleaving to the founding generation,
Solid stock,
Who chewed at timber,
Tore at rock,
And greened their lands
With defiant arteries of water.
As before,
The rains had failed him,
The snows slid too quickly
Down the dry throat
Of the hills,
And the land itself
Shrugged,
And dozed.
His children had come of age,
Loosed their grip –
The eldest fleeing to Baltimore,
And the baby
Disappearing over time
Into a heroin overdose –
Leaving him and his weathered wife
Alone,
Tangled up in the
Tired machinery of farming
And at war with everything,
From their own exhausted chemistry,
To the government’s grey wolves.
The timekeeper is fickle.
One moment she exalts us
And we look out upon
An ocean of ourselves.
The next,
We are islands
In a shallow sea of other,
Buoyed only by nostalgia,
And betrayed at last even by water,
The dearest of our children,
As she turns away from our fields,
Towards the lawns and gardens
Of those who would
Too easily forget
We were even here.
Every indigenous lung in Cuzco
Is filling up with carbon –
One more gift
From the New World
To the people of Peru.
But there are still streets
Not yet suffocating under the heavy breath
Of the diesel bestiary,
Streets with walls of great stone,
Imaginings
Quarried from the mind
Of the crimson Inca,
Where your lungs leap
Like thoroughbreds from the gate,
In pursuit of every molecule of oxygen
In the high, light air of the Andes.
And when I slip away
To catch my breath
Between the close walls of such a place,
I see a round Aymara woman
In a red, woven wool wrap
And worn fedora
Foraging in a pile of food waste
And the other serendipity of poverty.
Her brown skin stretches over
Her high cheekbones
As if over the frame of a drum.
Two children stand just aside,
Sucking their fingers
To some secret rhythm,
Their wide eyes,
And round, brown faces tethered
To their mother’s every move.
Across from them,
Another mother mines the mound.
In spite of the brown collar round her neck,
She is wasted and feral,
No longer carrying the loyalties
Of that more benevolent time.
Her pups, too,
Have learned to wait and watch,
Wagging their tails
In rhythm to their own anticipation
Of their mother’s return,
Her teats full,
Her snout damp with sweet mysteries.
It is a scene torn loose from a magazine
By the careless coriolis
Of the southern hemisphere.
That their trajectories
Should have collided in this place
Was unremarkable to them.
In the hand hewn, cobbled lottery of Old Cuzco,
Families suck the marrow
From the bones of a civilization
Long since flayed and gutted
By the long knives of history.
Only now,
We have decided
To embalm them in diesel fuel.