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From “Arizona Poems”
BY an alley lined with tumble-down shacks, | |
| And street-lamps askew, half-sputtering, | |
| Feebly glimmering on gutters choked with filth, and dogs | |
| Scratching their mangy backs: | |
| Half-naked children are running about, | 5 |
| Women puff cigarettes in black doorways, | |
| Crickets are crying. | |
| Men slouch sullenly | |
| Into the shadows. | |
| Behind a hedge of cactus, | 10 |
| The smell of a dead horse | |
| Mingles with the smell of tamales frying. | |
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| And a girl in a black lace shawl | |
| Sits in a rickety chair by the square of unglazed window, | |
| And sees the explosion of the stars | 15 |
| Fiercely poised on the velvet sky. | |
| And she seems humming to herself: | |
| “Stars, if I could reach you | |
| (You are so very clear that it seems as if I could reach you), | |
| I would give you all to the Madonna’s image | 20 |
| On the gray plastered altar behind the paper flowers, | |
| So that Juan would come back to me, | |
| And we could live again those lazy burning hours, | |
| Forgetting the tap of my fan and my sharp words. | |
| And I would only keep four of you— | 25 |
| Those two blue-white ones overhead, | |
| To put in my ears, | |
| And those two orange ones yonder | |
| To fasten on my shoe-buckles.” | |
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| A little further along the street | 30 |
| A man squats stringing a brown guitar. | |
| The smoke of his cigarette curls round his hair, | |
| And he too is humming, but other words: | |
| “Think not that at your window I wait. | |
| New love is better, the old is turned to hate. | 35 |
| Fate! Fate! All things pass away; | |
| Life is forever, youth is but for a day. | |
| Love again if you may | |
| Before the golden moons are blown out of the sky | |
| And the crickets die. | 40 |
| Babylon and Samarkand | |
| Are mud walls in a waste of sand.” | |
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