It's Still Life

Calarcá, Colombia: Two Days Before Christmas

I.
Night View

The village square is a wound stitched with fairylights.
Luminous sutures
on the velvet of night.

The plastic kings in earnest ride,
the donkey, a cow,
and Godnewborn abide.

And from the church,
a martial woven plea
marches forward in lockstep harmony.

But turn your eye,
just turn your head,
the alley breathes beside the chapel’s bed.

Two forms are curved
like commas in the gloom,
a different scripture
flowering from their loom.

Their flesh, a hymn
more ancient than the prayer,
offers a manger of its own,
and despair Is bartered there,
for coins that chafe the hand —

for scant, hard metal of this promised land.

Oh, simultaneous truth!
Oh, chanted creed,
the hungry, silent, transitory seed.

Two days till Peace is born in straw and glory.
Two nights to live the other’s older story.
The neon rainbow arcs above it all,
a bridge from paradise into the fall.

II
After the Tour Buses Pass

They see the postcard.
I see the thumbprint,
the smudge of wonder,
and the ache it left.

My eyes (these stormy maps)
have traced the contours:
the mountain’s spine,
the rust on doors.

The buses sigh and lift their dust,
a veil of gold and sacred trust.

They will only see
the light,
the thread,
the story
that the brochures have said.

But I linger in the air of
frying plantain,
incense, and the damp
that climbs the alleys
like a silent cramp.

I hear the echo
when the choir’s note ends.

The small, hard clink
of commerce between their loins.
The desperate grace,
the tragic vibrant cost
of simply being here,
of simply being lost.

This poem is not of bleak despair,
but of truth that roots us there.
A love that does not flinch,
but sees the whole:

The cradle,
and the rent within the soul.