River Ghost

Little Chihuahita shadowed beside Segundo barrio.

A dead German sheperd with a broken neck lies

on the side of the street for days. The stench

of El Paso’s sewage in the air, a Mexican flag hugely

flaps itself above the chain-linked fence

topped with razor wire. In the morning blue mountains

smog. South side of the border a man jogs.

The river’s bank green, small trees bob in the wind

like truffle-treats, mirage. Each day thousands cross

the open bridge, both ways,

each night they go home to sleep silence. Cars hum

and wait for hours like sleeping cats. A cemented river

half-dried, even the canal drains away. Some say droves

of shadows at night move ghost-like through the dying river.

These people grow invisible, as if air, irrelevant and holy;

at night I can hear the whisper of my grandfather,

“all the angels live in Juárez.”

There is an old language broken in my throat.

Some eyes mistake me for shadow. When I speak my voice

a fearful phantom. In spring dust storms come, the sky

browns, my visage half-forms beneath the Italian cypress;

and when the day’s moon is full in its silence,

I am afraid of my own darkness.

Source: Pity the Drowned Horses (University of Notre Dame Press, 2005)