Woman as a River Between Borders

I. The Chihuahua Desert

I rose early to wash the desert grime, watch

the unearthly flight of doves, the way pigeons

were poisoned incorrectly or how an elephant

was beaten with a stick. This is the way

of beginnings, women charmed by fits of language,

the cadence of bees around garbage cans,

the laughter of grackles, hot sun baking Coca-Cola

to sidewalks. Tumbleweeds and arroyos hush

day-long trips through barrios.

I am sand. My eyes grainy, tears brown,

and what of the different tones of bees or flies,

how a sting can kill us?

I’m speaking the language of smokers,

lung-full and wary, breathing a refinery chore,

my eyes black pits, Historically

I was fruit, voluptuous and campy, some might say

exotic, cheekbones native, my hips swaying.

II. The Rio Grande

I grew into the silence of third person, a landscape,

a mesa. I flew hard into the silence of gray smog,

my chest burning, my throat dry with the songs

of women with sagging faces, children

strapped to their bent backs.

They have become a river metaphor, a border,

a soulless chant to believers. Maquiladora workers slain

and buried in shallow graves. My palms refuse

to fold in prayer and god giggles in my red ears.

Sand pecks my skin like a drum roll in the hot wind.

The march of children, their backpacks plastic,

the way they see color a mystery, a dance, the shapes

of clouds, an elephant, a dove, a long-lost dog. They sing

song their way past the factory-circus.

III. The Potomac

Years later I loved a blank-faced man in tweed

who drank espresso and ate bagels in a deli outside

Washington D.C. His pale face mirrored in the glass

at a video-store where he grumbled artless

and unfilled by the hurried ache

of cicadas. His first and last job in the world

of mundane labor. He was all red hair;

his voice bellowed.

Was it the seventh or tenth year he dubbed

my language, subtitled my screens? Windows

on the metro metalled sand tunneled.

I lost the desert dance of blood, half-forgot

the closed copper mine, the way the border’s earth

is lead-filled and sullen.

IV. The Vlatva

Awed by cathedrals in Paris, then Prague,

I was the archangel of rage with my book-bag,

a wordless hum. I began to speak with my hands,

my eyes Slavic dark, searching. I worshipped

fat swans along the thick river taking in the green

wondering why I had been blessed by such beauty.

I sensed him in a snowdrift of words historically

divine. And what was he or I in this world? I didn’t see

the gold specks in his eyes, the way poetry

became his glory, full of fan-fare and the strife

of strip malls. And here, envying his pristine days,

the way the books never cover his mouth,

our hearts pump separately to the rhythm of loss.

Source: Pity the Drowned Horses (University of Notre Dame Press, 2005)

Poems on Immigration