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Saint Joe  after James WrightWhen the choppers churned and swayed the swift brown current like a field of cogon grasses, we dropped a rope below, but the native girl, no older than my daughter, was too weak to hold on, and let go. We had to leave her to refuel, though we knew what the river would do. When my duty was up, I chose to come here, for humid sheets over bamboo beds, for some honey in a slip-- a ninety-pound rice cooker named Ronda and the soap dance she's known to do. But hardly for love, as I wait with this man bent in my arms. When the Coca Cola truck hit this pedicab driver you could see his rubber slippers fly all the way up the second-floor window. His body thrown five meters from his cab. I imagine the Lord Jesus descending from his cross, a good marine saving the dead in limbo But on this god-forgotten street a crowd gathers, crows peck and gawk, and name me, "Joe." Their faces tell a separate story, each one ending with the sweet by and by like the girl whose hands slipped at the end of my rope dancing above the fury of a bloated river. A man in a suit sloughs off, whistles for a cab, a flotilla of rubber slippers converge on a two-inch lake of rain A pair of white hands, mine, reach for his limp body. And from the swollen streets, an ambulance calls, draws closer, louder. And I hold on, listen to children chant "Joe" in the rain. |