If you take the train South to--
I don't know if you will pass to here,
but anyway if you go to Los Mochis down on the coast,
your train will stop into Sufragio,
which is a little town several miles outside of Mochis itself.
Curious thing about Mexico as I'm sure many
of you discovered, that they build their train stations
outside of town.
I don't know if that's because of the taxi lobby or what.
But, one night we were starting a trip into Mexico
and the train arrives in Sufragio at 3:00
in the morning, a hellish hour in itself
and added to that there weren't any lights
in that area of Mexico that night, for whatever reason
I don't know.
And so you stumble around the strange town
and it was really rather dangerous
and that enters into this poem.
Sufragio.
By the way Sufragio means--
I think in Spanish suffrage like women's suffrage, what
that has to do with the naming of that particular place would
be very interesting to find out.
At first we went down the stairs into the mouth,
our baggage piled on our turbans,
hands spread over the dirty pictures,
guided only by a man on the other side
where the world went up, a flashlight waving
from his stomach.
I called and you answered, the stream of bubbles
following in the dark describing the birds that you carried
on your head like an Indian.
In round wire cages and scrolled like your dress
you said, like a painting of the sea,
but save, nodding further into sleep
behind lids crusted with honey.
Going past him, he babbled what wasn't necessary embarrassed
we saw he had dirtied his pants, that his head swung
and his hands twitched like a man talking in his sleep.
But at the top they had a letter in the vestibule
among glass offices.
We used a whole book of matches reading
through the irregular verbs to find out
in the end it was about us, and drove off
with a man with his hair waving with stars down
the straight road to the Osmochis Noticing
there just as promised rows of coconut palms
rigid in the tropical morning.
The entrance to the old Lopez ranch monkeys swinging in them
and the sun even at 3 o'clock beginning
over the Sierra Madre, and orange splitting into a hoof.