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 her silk 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.