for C

 

 

Through my torso, the smooth

 

diffusion of aguas ardientes. Another

 

shot. Dawn.

 

 

Fan whir covers distant

 

rooster crow, dog bark cuts through fan whir.

 

 

That the world has you in its time? Is that what

 

she said? Meaning I too

 

drank from the glass on the night stand, swallowing

 

the spider before I knew

 

I'd seen it?

 

Two

 

girls in heels and

 

communion dresses

 

cross the window, their necks

 

bent shyly down.

 

 

Glancing at my watch, I turn back

 

to the hechicera, her face ashen, whirled

 

with lines. You still haven't told me

 

if she'll recover, I say.

 

You have the eyes of-, she

 

repeats twice, not finding the word. Then,

 

De donde viene?

 

 

* * *

 

 

So the present

 

hoses itself out. And with it-

 

 

Sitting in the lobby of the clinic,

 

its walls painted

 

like children's rooms with starfish

 

 

and trains and jungle birds

 

and the children shuttling back and forth, the nurse

 

calling their name and a few words

 

 

in English or Spanish, the children

 

taking their mother's

 

or father's hand,

 

 

trailing the nurse past

 

a registration desk, down

 

the hall, the sequence of closed doors,

 

 

toward the one door open. Radiance inside. Bald

 

children wearing hats, and a bald baby in a mother's arms, and

 

here in the lobby, where I wait for you

 

 

to be X-rayed,

 

some stranger whose exhaustion

 

can't be fathomed, begins to snore. If this

 

 

is the world and its time, as irrevocably it is,

 

when I step out into sunlit air

 

suffused with sausage smoke and bus exhaust,

 

 

with its relentless ads

 

for liquor and underwear

 

where am I then?

 

 

* * *

 

 

Quien es? First words

 

of Hamlet. Last

 

of Billy the Kid.

 

 

Who is it on her knees in the Tepito market

 

screaming for money, naked to the waist,

 

operatic, arms raised to expose

 

double mastectomy scars?

 

 

Who is the traga-años, swallower

 

of years, selling me lottery tickets

 

in a tortilleria, a wrinkled

 

Mazatec in a red

 

t-shirt with the words Fresh

 

Fruit Delicious across her chest.

 

 

And who was it the surgeons narcotized

 

before excising a chunk of muscle and cancerous

 

flesh over my shoulder

 

blade and grafting the hollow

 

with a sheet of my own skin the breadth

 

of a paperback, assuring me later

 

the wound would fill in with blood and

 

flux so now,

 

twenty years later, this salsa de chile de arbol

 

makes my scar throb?