notas de la fogata fire notes

the simple act of fire

heat and light

fills our thought with understanding
creates metaphor in language

enlightenment = you're getting warm

and then there's the hot drink

in my modern taste
coffee mixed with damiana tea

buzz zzz mmmmmmmmmmm

you

see

you can see in the night

(i.e.: last night –ed.)

when I first lit the fire tonight
it was still daylight and I could read

and I looked up

there were parachutists descending from the sky
on the other side of the line

they fly out of Brown Field at sunset
and jump over the open land

beyond the factories

maybe you saw the beer add a year or two ago

skydiving is a sport with many years'
history here

although in recent years they've been taking to using those para-glide
wing chutes, and fly and float around going here, there,
circling on parade

up above the border

como escribe el gringo how he writes

I think there is some chemical
in the wood of these
produce crates

that smells bad

creo que hay un quimico
en la madera de estos
cajas de verduras

que huele mal

the empty cement front yard seems so different now
no SUV wagon no plastic tarp no
wall of plants no
clothesline

no tendedero de
ropa no pared de plantas
no carro SUV no tienda de plastico ya
parece muy diferente el vacío jardín de cemento

The old lady house across the street
has two Italian cypress trees on
either side of her little front
gate, and bougainvillea
flowering across
their wall.

In the evening I watch dusk fall across her house like a dark, green, Italian painting crumbling in some forgotten corner museum. She comes out to help her renter get his car down the driveway and out the other, bigger, gate. We shout hello across the street. One must always say hello. Oh yes.

It is hard to believe that so much variety of wall and gate and plant can be packed into a mere twenty-six feet of horizontal distance. Can you spell worker-neighborhood shoe-horn? By the time she and I die, those damn trees will be wayyyyyy too big. Someone else will cut them down. Or they'll burn up when the bomb explodes at the gate in another five or ten years when the war—

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