Sunday 22 November 2015

from Blackwater Quartet, selection 52




Names in Birth Order

We lived low rent in Juárez, in faded rooms
in a tiredness of heat near the Avenue of the Virgin,
night coming and going on the stairs, the curtains there
half-lifted to a moon outside
pale and big as Mexico.

Our lives were ordinary and obscure,
a narcotic, infusing sameness.
We prayed for cool breezes, for pardon,
for primary colours, but when we died
we found the gods who visit
come for cockfights in the painted pit,
not ceremonies of forgiveness. The wager of a candle lit
both ends, requires a sacrificial etiquette
we never managed.

We were the last of our line,
with all you heard about us true,
corrupt and unredeemed, the way the wind
cuts through the fields dry with shadows
everywhere and nowhere,
slow circles of weather, of ghosts drifting drowsily
above the cremations.

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