Zapotec
Harems
Seven women lived trapped
In a place where the men
Won’t go
Where a braided wall of tin
Meets a dusty floor
And fresh flowers
Race against the copal
To my nose
And the crows all sing, in a rainbow flock.
Seven Gumby, little,
old ladies
Whose tummies tuck behind their pails of wax,
From which they’ll garland out flowers
Just the way that I might make
A peanut butter and jelly sandwich,
Naturally.
Beautifully,
Each one plays the part
In a far-off desert oasis,
That it had taken me an hour’s hike to reach
And an hour’s bus and an hour’s walk to grasp
Floated
by myself along a hot, dirt road
My face still burns with the brown dirt
I tried to wash it off
But I just couldn’t bring myself to do it
How can I not remember
How they played Picasso with their pinpoint wands and wax?
Bent
into the grooves of a wooden art transformed
Into its being:
Her rich, geometrical fantasy
Relief into little clay dolls
Dripped in hues
Of sorrow
And floral skeletons, meanwhile
Just sipping on cigars
On the bus ride back, I watch
As the little old men beside me
Have all burst into a song, and while they are
Patting down the seats
Of a tattered fabric
To make for their only beats
They’re off to earn those little
wooden blocks
With their machetes all ready
As are their imaginations,
The both of theirs consciousness,
Unsheathed
Seven little men, who are
Chapped in the face
On a bus ride back
To that place where the flowers all grow
And, so, do the women all
wait
In the foreground,
Of an atrophied
Future
Glow |