The Last Man

for Vivian Schatz Here, in our familiar streets, the day is brisk with winter’s business. The reassuring rows of brick façades, litter baskets overflowing with the harvest of the streets and, when the light turns, the people move in unison, the cars miraculously slide to a stop, no one is killed, the streets, for some reason, do not show the blood that is pouring like a tide, on other shores. Martinez, the last peasant left alive in his village, refuses to run, hopes that God,El Salvador, will let him get the harvest in. “Can a fish live out of water?” he says for why he stays, and weeds another row, ignoring the fins of sharks that push up through the furrows. Here, it is said, we live in the belly of the beast. Ahab sits forever at the helm, his skin white wax, an effigy. The whale carries him, lashed to its side by the ropes from his own harpoon. His eyes are dead. His ivory leg juts from the flank of Leviathan like a useless tooth. One more time, the distant sail appears, a cloud forms, an old icon for mercy turned up in a dusty corner of the sky, preparing rain for the parched land, Rachel weeping for her children. “Can a fish live out of water?” he asks and the rain answers, in Spanish, manitas de plata little hands of silver on his brow.