Off the butt of a standard-issue rifle: the rose-blue swollen eye
of a tabloid printer from Santiago--out of his clenched
and chocolate fist: grenadine, gardenias, hand-grenades
for a dictator of marshalled thoughts. The lecture on Trotsky
let out two minutes too soon: troops arrived from Camp Lejeune,
tuned to the slide of sea towards Haiti and all that sentimental
slop on whale sharks. At age eight, Rudi Acosta and I sat
back on camp cots a sea apart to wait out the invasion
of Tres Ojos. Trujillo's World's Fair paid back whatever
a caudillo owes the States--out on a barque he squat and shat
into a billiard bag. At home, the cinemas and squalor
were on fire. Liar that he was, he sang that Mir song
sweet and thunderous to little girls of sugar made
his mothers and lovers and confessors:
Hay un pais en el mundo
colocado en el mismo trayecto del sol
oriundo de la noche.
I tried to translate the disregard for all of us from where I was.
It was thirteen years till I could see for myself what was left
of that monsoon on the Malecon, those headlands my grandparents
pillaged for rum and Coke, rare bright birds, and cane to suck on.

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