Matador, 1993
It’s as though you woke up from a long time away, your body still riddled by the trauma of an injurious daunt: the bullet or the blade, muscles or words and how they almost broke you. The air cooler now; the body still little.
You are sitting in a city’s hot pavement square or you are climbing a grass hill to a garden plot. The mass of electricities passes you by; shadows of steel papered with letters to the missing and gone. Rows of grounded vines stretch out like steps that you cross and the crusty matter of summer’s off-sling is percussive beneath sneakers. Blisters swell your heels.
In the time you were out and now, when you’re lessened, some pairings had changed. Others had not.
I think some part of me, he said, will always.
But it still didn’t make sense to you, to see them kiss and his small hand like a flesh raw thing in that rust red birds nest hair.
Everyone was not hurt while you were. The harvest was over. The city unslept.
