Mayan Women Balancing Bundles on Their Heads, Guatemala
You would see them along the highland roads
or gracing Calle Santander in Panajachel,
movements like blue water, clouds you could gather up.
You thought of earth, of bark and honeycomb,
volcanic dreams suddenly seeded with ash.
How the dyes of their clothing beckoned
to the sluggish stream calcifying your bones.
How it quickened, then flooded the fields with silt.
Two Charcoal Drawings from Central Asia
One Uzbek, the other Tajik. These turbaned tribesmen
bookend the bow hung on my bedroom wall.
Artifacts from my father’s life in jungle and steppe.
I cannot see their hands, but I know their gnarled,
rough beauty, so like the wayward contours of oak.
And weathered faces resigned to a moon’s coy tricks.
Invisible between them, my father rides eastward.
This morning the world comes on the wind.
What I Saw in Seville
What wasn’t there. Walking those whitewashed
neighborhoods I felt the Moor at my shoulder.
Fountains gushed into Arabic courtyards. Wrought
iron grillwork adorned the balconies. Men without women,
without even guitars, clapped their hands together
and danced to the staccato beat of their blood.
Here bullion poured in from the New World.
Here Columbus took ship, sword pointed west.
