This is a poem that goes back to Mexico.
I lived in a fairly small village for some time,
and it was primarily a fishing village.
At least, that was a large part of the economy.
Most people did not make a very good living at it,
and it was a poor village.
It's a poem called "The Fish/Lago Chapala."
It's in three small sections.
I should explain just a bit some allusions
at the end of the poem.
Very often, around the edges of the lake,
or when you dug for wells or things of this sort,
people would turn up a very small clay pot, sometimes
the size of a thimble.
And they were called locally tear pots.
And the story was that the tribes of Indians who
had lived around the lake had used those pots to catch either
a teardrop or they slice their earlobe
with a piece of obsidian and caught a drop of blood
and gave it to the lake, I suppose
for the very good reason that the lake was to give back.
Any rate, there is a kind of allusion to that
at the end of the poem, or coming back to that.
"The Fish/Lago Chapala."
Sunrise, the tiny, almost transparent fish of Chapala
drawn in nets.
All afternoon, shining and steaming on the roadsides,
scattered or in small mounds like fingers of broken glass.
At nightfall, the dog licks me with his mouth of fish.
The children's hair is spangled with the stars of fish.
Our shoes darkened in their skins of fish.
This morning, a procession on the road,
a priest, four men lugging a small
painted coffin, some women in dark shawls.
Morning of heat and thin smoke on the hills,
mourning of one less child.
The women washed it.
The priest wrapped it in incense.
The fields arose and blessed it with dust.
A child in a blue box enters the earth in a fragrance of fish.
The land was mesquite, prickly pear, rock.
He saw his face in the water.
Into a tiny bowl shaped like a black nut,
he let fall one tear, one drop of blood,
and cast it to the lake.
This happened so long ago.
The tear became a fish.
The drop of blood became a fish.
We eat the harvest every day."