THE TOWN IN THE MOUNTAINS

 

Street dogs

are the owners of the darkness

of the town.

They live off the waste of

the civilized,

They have their own mayor

and administer their own laws.

They write letters to the frogs,

they call cats up on the telephone.

They occupy all the silence that

has been abandoned.

Their breath is a form of sight.

They take turns with the bitches

who become pregnant from a few

within the same placenta.

The barks seem to come

from the trees.

Out there in the distance

near the foot of the mountains,

from the last streets,

They poeticize the moon

invite her to come down

to share some bone.

They incorporate into your

nightly toss and turn,

barks of pillow turns within

dim obscurity.

Jumping from one dream to another,

an eye opens to the shadows

and the forms,

We sit momentarily to think what

it is all about,

Allah we whisper.

Returning to the darkness of

the stupor

We dream the details of animal

interiors,

In photographic clarity,

while street dogs

just smell and mount ass.

 

Victor Hernández Cruz

From his latest poetry collection,

The Mountain in the Sea (Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 2006, pp. 102-03)