A Letter from the Village of Trees

for Gloria
A whole year in which the fields mourn the absence
of horses, in which you sat in the open, in a country
away from me, drinking mint tea as a projector played
Los Olvidados, Oum, So What if The Goats Die.
I was stuck in the village, living with an anthropologist
from Belgium, writing vignettes about trees, their shadows,
the swiftness of language. And on the day of the dead,
I walked away from the quiet of my room, from the fellowship
of the restless, that space where what is alive laments the heat,
the lamp holding back darkness, the white curtains which separated
our lives. Around the many roads that led to the river of rituals,
abode of those still tethered to earth, the old men,
the old workers beaten into the edge of dust, waited
by the store, waiting to order from the bowlegged clerk
gin, rum, cigarettes gotten from a faraway city.
The shacks between the store and Queen’s Road,
made out of nylon, folded and unfolded in the wind.
The language of worry was alive, shared on each door
like the blood of a firstborn lamb. And on passing
these crumbs of desolation, I saw them,
the old men, staring into distance, turning the movement
of boats into stories they will tell by moonlight;
stories of hostels forgotten at the edge of foreign cities
where men washed plates, dead bodies, old skin, and even
restrooms where a man after using a urinal spat out
his words, leaving it on the ground – a dead thing
waiting to be cleaned.
I had nothing to interpret to the world, nothing to say
to the anthropologist who walked beside me, saying,
I have studied your people and their docile ways,
their acceptance of tyrants. And as I turned to the night,
I heard the ending of a Greek play, a school boy roaring
in all seriousness into the sky, O Ithaka, I have loved you
through sorrow, I have loved you through the stars,
the anagram of wonder, through the vastness of the world.
Photo by https://unsplash.com/@merifoodface?utm_source=unsplash&utm_medium=refer…