by Susan Briante
They come down from the mountains like clouds, like christs, and wander into the cities. In addition to the difference in sea levels, there is the stark gap of languages. A new vocabulary writhes in the hard center of the jaw:
mirrored building, carburetor, safety pin, glue.
Much will go unwritten, read only in the pucker and slack of lips.
Many objects get named twice:
a plastic bowl,
a plastic bowl with a slender crack.
Translations swell until the lyric is sung to the wrong woman, brown instead of black, velvet instead of cotton, some shallow veil of crepe, or not a dress at all, the water at certain times of the year like gauze, like the blurred lines of age or the lines that were forgotten the last time someone sang it, making her much less.
And where he had written Uxmal ruins
And where he had written Aquiles Serdán mine
And where he had written Taxco historic church
There is a time when you realize that anything can be produced in Mexico: wheel chairs, action figures, rice paper, lime. There is a time when you realize that for everything you are thinking, there is a word, sometimes two.
Alive in the hard center of the jaw,
you spell them the way they sound
And where he had written Jojutla sugar refinery
And where he had written Xochimilco floating gardens
And where he had written La Fundición sulfur baths
There was nothing
a bowl could not carry.
This poem first appeared in The Marlboro Review (Marlboro, Vermont: No. 10. Summer/Fall 2000).