Adolfo
remember that night of the Bandito Wind swindling
a live oak out of a few of its leaves, the rest
hanging on, to life presumably, and a scent
in the air, wayward, like a fragrance
with a name like Risqué or Rogue, tempting
the last saints to mingle with devils? Of course
you don’t—you were not there, in that world, just as
you are not here. If you are not dead,
you might be that broke-down fellow bothering
some pretty girl in a London Fish and Chips shop.
I am no seer, yet I see you—you convening with the last
Marxists who drift through town, the beautiful
warriors, curmudgeonly now, and still
complaining that Fidel let them down.
Or, you’re running another arthouse cinema, this time
back in Peru, in one of those neighborhoods
resistant to art. But they will find out, those habitantes,
how hard you are to resist.
Adolfo, you mad lover, you chose a poet,
and with a poet what do you get, years,
decades, after the fact? Lies. Lies
and inventions, and some truth, but a poem,
a love poem, real, still living, like these live oaks
that spread their canopies of dense branches
blackened by shadow over the road, and in the distance,
what a journeyman poet, or maybe one
just starting out, would call the vanishing highway.