Mestizaje

Your voice on the road.

Me and pale sandals

shielding my eyes from the sun.

In the vision I had of myself in childhood

O wore a sling of leather

O a woman in control

Never these ices, muddy on a dud hill

in Ohio.

The goats bashful and ripping steam

shitting out endless

pulsing pellets.

Little Cross

They said that he drank,

and so I found his grave.

Jutting from sand

like a bat’s wing/ tin

burnt green in the sun that comes from Mexico.

Oh lowly brushfires,

Tio Francisco

who holds the child

where the land flattens

into this dismal smoke.

who could sleep in this heat,

in this dazzled folkland

of skeletons–

I dreamt the mountains

and the beast in the mission

and the cat’s eye dangling

from its wet socket.

The transparent

soul of a child. Roadrunners

run here.