Definition of 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 on-line
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 a 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.
IV
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.
