At Yacquitepec

Is the dreamer dead?

His voice is dust on a page, his home a ruin –

he is nearly forgotten.

We sought him, and his dreams, stepping away

from the hard world, those things

of time and place and chest pains –

We climbed a trail hewn by other seekers,

ready for things alive, the twitter and the quiet.

We sought solace.

At Yacquitepec we could see the desert – the glimmering

sand, the brown brush, the red fragments of stones –

still, we breathed life.

We ate oranges, drank water and tried

To imagine Marshal and Tanya.

We dreamed.

There is an apparition on Ghost Mountain. It is

the sea, a ghost of a sea, rolling from shore

to shore, lapping at crags and crevices on dark mountains.

Or was it the silent sea of human misery?

I saw a bolder, a watch tower; I had seen the dreamer there,

standing darkly against the evening sky.

What did he see?

Was he blind to the follies of men? Did he see

a fair vista, a far shore –

a world for us?

(Marshal is buried in an unmarked grave.

Is it wrong to dream?)

Did he see a world free of man’s retchings, his lurchings

his putrid, turbid, petty rumors of spite and envy?

What did he see from his Ghost Mountain rock?

Yes. There is a world for us.

A world bereft of avarice and capricious calamity,

a world waiting for seekers and dreamers.

There is a world for us.

At Yacquitepec we can feel its tingle on our skin,

coming to us on the whispering feet of a desert wind,

A wind stirred by a lifeless sea.

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