1.

Guatemala.

Good Friday.

It seems surreal that my time here is wrapping up. How do we ever encompass ourselves-- the people we have mirrored, smiles spreading over their faces at shared amusement? the stories we've been told in whispers, in raised voices, with eyes-tear-brimmed, downcast, starring into us? the stories we've used to articulate ourselves? talking ourselves and others in and out of euphoria and despair? the moments of exhaling between words, the moments of simply being present, of bearing witness to anothers existence? moments of delight, despair, hope, teasing, musing. I have been doing so much living and discovering here. There are so many snapshots playing in my head of the ordinary moments I have lived with friends here. Seven months is longer than some of my lifetimes.


I.
You talk of the systems you have lost faith in
your government and socialism, justice,
capitalism, and also the hippies,
the church was the first, the left the latest,
et cetera and et cetera,
you ask: what is left to believe in?
and I craddle my head in my arms
as if my body could shelter me from these realities
as if I could mother myself, then us, to wholeness

But: I protest: people live under these systems
and yet, we love this life
You look me in the eyes to remind me:
It is the poor who suffer; it is the poor who always pay.
I look you in the eyes because I can afford to
this is the truth: I say: perhaps to live is to suffer...

You protest: yet, still, we love this life.

We speak in your language,

an inheritance of colonization after
the history of tribes: everything with its sordid history
everything with its spectacular beauty

II.
The street breathes cold down my neck
and I smile at the sharp autumnal scent
of cigarette smoke, the end a ring 
the same neon hot as the clouds last memory of the
day's color-bleached heat. Jorge's hand
scatters ash as he laughs:
we can't quite learn to love ourselves,
I put tobacco on my fields as insecticide,
I put this in my body? Inhales, exhales,
and shakes his head still smiling.

I hug my body, though Jorge has
told me, I have at least five. This material one
is only the first level. I squeeze my arms
around my ribs to cup the body of energy,
though like water it pours out:
I can not look anyone in the eye

without being devoured.

III.
I dream of the bodies of trees.
Juan stopped the car in the moonlight after midnight
so we could embrace la Ceiba, the tree which
connects the underworld to the heavens
: solamente para este.We embraced the trunk, feet stepping on her roots-
we, dwellers of this middle ground.