At Twilight on the Road to Sogamoso

The sun is beginning to go down over a field of yellow onions. The edges of the clouds are almost pink, and at this hour the maguey rises up like a flower of dark blades. I worked so long today I have forgotten my own hunger. It takes a full minute for me to remember a word I have used all my life. What the Mexicans call poncho. At twilight I see it, abandoned, hanging like a ghost on the limb of a tree: my own brown ruana next to gray speckled chickens pecking at roots and a black track of storm coming west over the green mountain.