Stranger
Person not a member
of a group. A visitor,
guest, or the breast
that brushes your arm
on the subway. Person
with whom you’ve had
no acquaintance but who’s taken
your rocking chair
from the curbside
and curls up in it
and closes her eyes.
Person in line
behind you now, waiting
for a glass of water,
of whiskey, of elixir.
Person logging online
at the same second
from the Home Depot in Lima
or in search of the Dalai Lama.
Person not privy or party
to a decision, edict, etcetera,
but who’s eaten
from the same fork
at the pizzeria
and kissed your wilder sister
on New Year’s. Person assigned
to feed the tiger at the zoo
where you slipped your hand
once
into the palm
of somebody else’s father.
Into the Atacama
I
When I said I wished this trip, I meant the rush of song as we left
the city. I meant the bus. I meant the woman who played her flip-
flops like drumsticks against the window. For singing with strangers
in a desert is like getting closer to the moon. And each moment is
like the glow of the moon, caught behind clouds and then visible
and then hidden again.
And when I said here, I meant elsewhere—I meant moving.
II
Out of the brush and nothing: a clutch of homes, a grove of papaya
trees. For every leaning tin roof, eleven graves. And why else do
people stay, if not the orchard, if not to garden around the losses
that outnumber us? For what place after this much history isn't
pinned to the ground with gravestones?
When I said the girl selling papaya out of her apron brought a
certain movie to mind, I really meant my life—the way she tilted
into the roadside, the wind blowing her skirt between her legs.
III
At dusk, more wind and a plummeting blue: the million dunes
beyond us grew fainter and loomed larger. When the bus stalled, I
thought: justice. Who did we think we were to cross the desert in
a matter of hours?
Later, we would say it was forty years.
IV
As long as the bus moved, we knew what it was. But in stillness it
could be anything, and there we were—trapped in the anything.
Tumbleweed spun against rocks, into the arms of cacti, into each
other, and emptiness.
We left the bus and became presidents. We became lovers and got plucky
and sucked the earth dry. Thirsty, we turned back to the
slower work of trust and papaya trees, the only water a hundred
miles down.
V
After what might have been forty years, the bus remembered it was
a bus. It hummed and carried us on—our worn shoes a thinner
music against the window.
