Chiapas

There is the one who turns A spoon over like a letter, Reading the teeth-marks Older than his own; The one who strikes a match, Its light flowering In his eyes, The smoke in his throat; The one who opens the mouth Of a dog to listen To the sea, white-tipped And blind, feel its way to shore. At night They walk in the streets, The dust skirting their legs Raw with lice And the wind funneled Through a doorway Where someone might pray For a loaf of good luck. * Somewhere the old follow Their canes down A street where the front Pages of a newspaper Scuttle faceless And the three-legged dog hops home. A door is locked twice And flies ladder a scale of fish. Somewhere a window yellows From a lantern. A child With fever, swabbed in oils And mint, his face Spotted like an egg, His cry no different Than the cry That shakes the trees lean. A candle is lit for the dead Two worlds ahead of us all.