South of the border among the pluripresence
of jellied heat, east of the setting sun, in
Nogales, Mexico, where this sort of thing can occur,
you glimpse, twenty-five meters off the shoulder
of the road, a Mexican woman who’s walking
alone: black-haired, slender, sun-soaked, tall, her
baked bare arms aglow with toffee-colored skin, 
her wet eyes friendly, yet faintly mocking.
She is not old, though clearly a little older,
and she appears so abruptly through your acute
windshield-glare and comes into your site
as something sprung from an underground gate 
and is so unexpectedly there
in the gigantic western sunlight
which turns to copper-gold her silken black hair
that for an instant the world, like a top,
wobbles to a stop
and everything that’s ever happened to you
all at once, in a way you can’t articulate
and yet unquestionably true,
makes absolute
sense.