You are tired of Americans –
of watching them smile like people on T.V and pour cream, without fat
into coffee.
Americans turned history into Star Wars and Star Wars into CGI aliens
with Jamaican accents.
Around us are palaces
the color of Easter
that look like Paris.
We are sitting on a terrace in the City of Columns arguing whether people are civilizations.
On the streets below
children spill out of yellow
school buses imported from Quebec their inscriptions read: “ECOLIERS”.
In the cracks between traffic
the children move through this day –
through the years –
like rain runoff through a dry streambed
and puddle
around relics from the dawn of the nuclear age:
Chevy Bel Airs
the color of sunrise
with chrome eyebrows over their tail lights. Thunderbirds with tortoise shell
interiors and engines idling
sounding like sour mud.
On the bronze terrace
the dust has settled like fresh snow and the light from a sun climbing down into the sea
looks like desert sand.
As it sinks below the horizon the children freeze –
the chariots of industry settle and the men in them look up as if in prayer.
Havana was the future once –
several times –
and you say this in evening’s old heat stagnant as air over brackish waters with your eyes unblinking
letting the sky’s violence fall into them. There is a window between night
and what it swallows
you say
where you can wait for a beginning, but it closes
and the streetlights flicker on. •
