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 meters to your right a thin
Mexican woman who’s walking
alone: black-haired, willowy, tall, her
long arms aglow with toffee-colored skin, 
her wet eyes friendly yet faintly mocking.
She isn’t old, though a little older, and in
the rippled heat she splits in two, and then the mute 
sunlight that crashes down and coppers her black hair
swallows both of her whole. Vanished. You blink and stare.
Not gradually, then, but as one forged in light 
and heat and a crucible of shimmering air
she reemerges through your acute
windshield glare and comes back into full sight
as something sprung from an underground gate
no longer split but reconfigured and whole
yet almost entirely unrecognizable.
With narrow eyes you watch her transmute
from old soul into a state indistinguishable from hate
and stand so unexpectedly there in the brute
southwestern light among the dusty silicate 
and murderous sun and exposed cactus root   
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
yet unquestionably true
makes absolute
sense.