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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-drenched, tall, her
arms baked and bare and aglow with toffee-colored skin,
her wet black eyes friendly yet mocking.
She is not old, though clearly a little older,
and she appears so abruptly through your acute
windshield-glare, coming into your site
as something sprung from a subterranean grate —
so unexpectedly there in the sharp western light —
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.