I See Chile In My Rearview Mirror

By dark the world is once again intact,

Or so the mirrors, wiped clean, try to reason. . .

–James Merrill

This dream of water–what does it harbor?

I see Argentina and Paraguay

under a curfew of glass, their colors

breaking, like oil. The night in Uruguay

is black salt. I’m driving toward Utah,

keeping the entire hemisphere in view–

Colombia vermilion, Brazil blue tar,

some countries wiped clean of color: Peru

is titanium white. And always oceans

that hide in mirrors: when beveled edges

arrest tides or this world’s destinations

forsake ships. There’s Sedona, Nogales

far behind. Once I went through a mirror–

from there too the world, so intact, resembled

only itself. When I returned I tore

the skin off the glass. The sea was unsealed

by dark, and I saw ships sink off the coast

of a wounded republic. Now from a blur

of tanks in Santiago, a white horse

gallops, riderless, chased by drunk soldiers

in a jeep; they’re firing into the moon.

And as I keep driving in the desert,

someone is running to catch the last bus, men

hanging on to its sides. And he’s missed it.

He is running again; crescents of steel

fall from the sky. And here the rocks

are under fog, the cedars a temple,

Sedona carved by the wind into gods–

each shadow their worshiper. The siren

empties Santiago; he watches

–from a hush of windows–blindfolded men

blurred in gleaming vans. The horse vanishes

into a dream. I’m passing skeletal

figures carved in 700 B.C.

Whoever deciphers these canyon walls

remains forsaken, alone with history,

no harbor for his dream. And what else will

this mirror now reason, filled with water?

I see Peru without rain, Brazil

without forests–and here in Utah a dagger

of sunlight: it’s splitting–it’s the summer

solstice–the quartz center of a spiral.

Did the Anasazi know the darker

answer also–given now in crystal

by the mirrored continent? The solstice,

but of winter? A beam stabs the window,

diamonds him, a funeral in his eyes.

In the lit stadium of Santiago,

this is the shortest day. He’s taken there.

Those about to die are looking at him,

his eyes the ledger of the disappeared.

What will the mirror try now? I’m driving,

still north, always followed by that country,

its floors ice, its citizens so lovesick

that the ground–sheer glass–of every city

is torn up. They demand the republic

give back, jeweled, their every reflection.

They dig till dawn but find only corpses.

He has returned to this dream for his bones.

The waters darken. The continent vanishes.

1991, W. W. Norton and Company