‘1867’

Abstract

At night in the garden under a bunch of ripening mango / Maximilian dances that which will become the tango. / His shadow keeps co-ming back like a boomerang, / the temperature, like an armpit’s, is thirty six [F96.8]. / / The vest’s white lining gleams. / A mulatto girl is melting from love like a chocolate bar, / sweetly and heavily breathing in a male embrace. / She is smooth where she is supposed to be smooth and woolly where she is supposed to be woolly. / / In the stillness of night, under the canopy of virginal forest, / Juarez, acting like an engine of progress, / distributes new rifles among peons / who have no memory whatsoever of how two pesos would look together. / / The rifle bolts a-clanging, Juarez marks / boxes on the squareruled form. / And a parrot of quite tropical colouring / Sits on a tree branch and sings: / / Among rose-smellers, contempt for fellow humans / is, perhaps, not better but more honest than striking a civic pose. / Both generate blood and tears. / Especially here, in the tropics, where death, alas, / / is being spread, like infection by flies, / or like a well-turned phrase in a cafe, / and where skulls in the bushes always have three eyes, / with a rank tuft of grass in each.