Thursday, October 27, 2016

Imperio do real II

The mist quickly fills the air, turns illusions into nothing at all:
Mesquite and sajuaro are as elusive as you want them to be,
Kind enough to exist or not, as we please.
What seemed so insurmountable: Raw mountains
Punctured like a scalpel and left to fester and boil,
The red flesh stretched in stripes over exposed muscle,
Volcanic shoulders draped before the lace of the sea,
While bony trees on pocked plateaus were swept up in the wind,
Catholic, incessant, life-affirming ...

                                                                   It's too austere here even for Mexicans,
With scattered haciendas on the highlands, severe pueblos near shore.
The ocean and its salts hold incomparable riches below, 
But the golden hills give off not even the sulfur of death,
They are useless except as beauty, a pose of nothing left to lose,
But still holding a place in the implicate order, universal
As they stand alone, unwanted, unknown, but no less hermetic
Than the cities, only more resolute in their resistance, their infinite
Clarity –

                        Not like the one mind of the mixing trucks
That touch up the hillsides with columns and fountains
And the textures and colors of heaven, filled in by the imagination
While the sun-burnt damianas hold the real safe from us,
Who would only sleep in its comforts without dreaming,
That thing that we do best.