First night in San Mateo Ixtatan

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Beneath a web of vines,
she memorized the patchwork of the stars.
This she did three thousand miles
north, three thousand miles—
from the sky?—no, away
her body reflected three thousand times,
that body the stars reflected.
But they had escaped
the night,
those stars
fled from the fog,
how audacious it was,
the icing of fog.
That night it had draped itself
over the flaccid buildings,
over the glazed eyes
of grandmothers;
they tied the charcoal pigs,
tied their necks to wooden posts,
and from the posts,
those pigs, they did not know, those pigs,
whether the stars had scattered,
or hidden, had they hidden that evening?
The pigs could never know.
Only the one displaced,
uprooted from the north,
hated that evening,
and its barren stars,
how hidden, those stars,
how lost they were in the fog. .

Like a coffin,
the fog, the sky,
she thought this,
then three men passed who carried one;
it bore holes in the bones of their shoulders.
The coffin, its contents,
it sensed the earth, the earth
that pulled this towards its dampened flesh.
And the night, these men,
their coffin, their lost stars
that had been promised
from the north
like the moon; it was no more
than the sallow film
which poked out from the milky screen,
draping no more than a fingers length in front of her eyes.
The moon was sinking,
sank like those three bodies
that drooped below the coffin,
And finally the burial—
they all would share this
that evening, all but she
who would not descend
beneath anything so immutable,
and so a pinch of light wedged itself
between and her feet and the earth
That could not summon her
that evening,
For the fog had descended,
and only that which wasn’t
could lure her empty body
from the mist.

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