Coahuila 60

How long ago is it that you lived
at number 60 Coahuila street?

The old landlady must be dead
and the guests won’t be able to savor
at breakfast
cactus stalk with egg-white.

The city that remains in your memory
is tiny: the Zócalo, the pawnshop
the girl who drove you in her car
to the amusement park
the exhausting hours visiting the anthropological
museum
the two seals with whom you spent lonely
Sundays.

As well as those ashes of your youthful years
there remains the journey through the south, eating in peasant houses
talking to schoolchildren in the plazas of Puebla
Oaxaca, Atitlán, San José
and the faces of the Carib girls
when they saw your body hair, the shape of your buttocks
the elaborate smallness of your genitals;
and a taste: salted meat and coconut rice
that you prepared for a brick-layer, the best patron
you’ve ever had.

You’ll never go back now to Colonia Roma.
You won’t experience again that taste for the minimal,
the infinite, adventure and solidarity.

Traslated from Spanish by Rowena Hill