But it is on the way to the ruins that I see
what will await me, to go is to follow,
over the dry dusty road,
past the fields where celica grows, to submit
to the lurch of the bus and when
it stops look beyond the broken fence,
to where the worker wears a box from a six-pack over his head,
some hundred schoolchildren pile on,
the aisle fills and the black oven
in a backyard smokes,
and—in Merida outskirts—
white bulls overrun a cement block
housing project in a dried-up marsh,
and a back fence gathers
the blue and green and aquamarine of the gulf,
where frigates soar beyond shadows
and palm trees and rose-colored stones,
and a child molds his "sad castle" only to tear it down…
and the bus breaks down beside a black tin
and burlap shack with a sign chalked in—
"Tiendo ‘San Franscico’" and a pot-bellied man
savors a Coke at a roadside stand,
the rock guitarist on his rose-colored tee shirt
exploding into notes,
and behind me a man in a white suit dabs his forehead
and confesses to his seat mate,
"I’m a lonely man, doctor,
I get headaches to remind myself I’m alive…."
Police vans crowd the roadside,
two men face each other down in a grove,
(which one through is the "perpetrator"?)
and uniformed men are coming in
with enough guns and ammunition for a small war,
and I know the ruins stand at the day’s end,
without doors, without exits.
And if we praise ruins why not the ruined man.