the untouched flowers huddle in their shantytowns, pried
away from each other, like claustrophobes, as you root
through the shattered lumber, the old, fluted piping, the
prehistoric remains of a blue china teaset that had been in your
family for generations, and that you never used, but kept on shelves
where they squatted in hatcheries, handmaids around the
mistress teapot, because they were too good for you.
the sun is setting, the cries of displaced and frightened people,
of people singing, of people mending, of people looking, searching,
of people bleeding, last words floating around us like ash. the
seabirds speak in ugly, prophet dialects, the sun breaking
like an amniotic sac and the foetus clouds curled and slumbering
and dreaming red, cottony, fibrous dreams.
little naked black boy, weeping, weeping, his belly swollen and standing
in the middle of the ribbed, scuttled road where his brother lies, sainted
with blood, split open by rebar like a toad on a dissection plate. the air
is black, smogged, midges of light and mosques of flame and smoke.
you dig, dig, dig, looking for the polaroid of your great-great grandmother
on the beach, the bandages on your head ghostly and flapping loosely,
but trapped, like greenhouse gases, as you dig with nothing but
your bleeding fingers.
I leave you and walk into the coming night, the night settling in with its
cassocks of shadow, the darkness covering the eyes of the dead like
priests with their beads and last rites. there are no streetlights tonight,
no houselights, only the fires, and the full moon, curious and snooping,
its light soft and unformed, like babysounds.
port-au-prince glowers, its buildings shelved, roads brittle and
the flies breed, washing their hands like arthropodic doctors
preparing for the next morning.
