Some more poems

Courtyard of the Museo des Belles Artes

She’s brought January rain to San Miguel.
The poor people here are wearing
garbage bags to keep out the wet cold

and at night they are dying. Despite this
men in the square still call out Hey, chica
to the blond northern whore as she passes by.

She sits in the courtyard, skin dead-white,
served tea by a Mayan with blue-black hair
thick and strong as a cable-tow.

Four cobbled paths converge in the courtyard
from the points of the compass to a stone Lamb
of God, bathed by a fountain.

All around there are leaves like falling tears,
tongue-like, arrow-like, all pointing fingers–
there is the pagan, she who does not believe.

The church bell’s clang begins– single beats,
tranquil at first, familiar, but then
a furious alarm, a mad-man’s hammering.

Mexican Silver

In the back of every jewelry store
there is a girl who is kept busy polishing away
the taint of disappointed love,
spread through songs
of white-haired guitarists in the public park.

The corrosion of funerals
penetrates even midday in the square
with its heavy equestrian statue
flanked by papyrus reeds–

exhalations of the misunderstood,
the jilted, the abandoned,
effluvia that burn the nostrils

each adding a distinctive tinge
to the patina on the wide bracelets like shackles,
the yellowing waxen figures

Mexico

Bless her with pink
and bleak citron yellow of paper flowers
with the penetential green of funerary tiles

Bless her with onyx, glossy and faceted,
with verdigris and noble oxidized silver,
square paving stones of agate.

Bless her with blue jasmine,
with Madonna lilies and the grey pads
of prickly pear.

Bless her with flaking clay pots
and domes of eroded stone coarsened with lichen,
gold leaf and the crystal of chandeliers.

Bless her with fountains and with arches,
with palm trees and oranges hanging like lamps–
let black and silver mariachi play in the public park.