Tonight an old man follows the narrow streets
turning and returning like a thought.
His hat down, his loose pants flapping,
he looks in at the light of a cantina,
then walks on, wind in a thin body of dust.
He has looked everywhere. Already his sons
are lost and now his daughter has slipped
away, the girl who wakened him like rain.
Five mongrels, bleached by the moon, circle him
and snarl, slouching like thieves. They take him
for a stranger, but he pries a stone from the street.
He has lived here longer than any of them.
He knows where she must be: in the gardens
of the rich, it rains every day. She sits
on the branch of a jacaranda, while a man
with perfect teeth, hardly younger than himself,
holds to her mouth a slice of pineapple.
“Eat,” he says as the juice drips from his hand.
She eats and a black dog slides from the shadows
to lick the moonlight falling on her legs.
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