Our Own Making

Santo Domingo de los Colorados / Tsáchila
It begins with a history that evades us—this movement
this indescribable tenderness for the hold of the valley
that raised us. Each winding on the cliffside road we knew
so well, each landmark of the equatorial backbone was another
in a series of visions that made and unmade us.
In dreams I am the washed out roads, the blue-throated
hummingbird against the raven, the Devil’s features carved into
the rock face familiar like my own unmooring. It opens
with fog, a chapel at the mouth of a cliff, and in it the rows of candles,
and Mary in her body of wood, weeping because the earth has a tendency
to split. Only each time afterwards, after the rain, in the chasms
the soft earth breaks with new green. Like this all the land undulates;
our heads bumping gently on pillows in the backseats of cars. We sleep and wake,
forgetting which is real. We name rivers like shamans in a language
that isn’t ours but familiar.
My hair, your hair, we are of the same
body. And we have the same dream, where small, white flowers
line the walls and precipices: always, the sharp scent of burning
palm oil and the factory hum that squeezes it from its bearing fruit;
the snakes I see awake and in my dreams, shedding, cut open for ransom.
This: my holy land: when I wake all of it is on fire—
save the blue, chlorinated pool besides the muddy river
and the sound of frogs, endlessly, in all our waking.