Jagged with Love

Santo Domingo Full of Song

sanTO DOmInGO FULL OF SonG Here your language is worth nothing. Your tongue follows you hesitantly, six steps behind, conchos honking, boys on mopeds careening back and forth from the plaza. You should, you know, billow out, out to all the sights, spread a pink fan from Santiago. You will eat mandarin oranges and fried yucca for lunch. You will touch the bright purple flowers in the tree. You will hold your skirt at Boca de Diablo, its terrible wind rushing out of rock, waves. Stillyou will be a blank woman, unsure as your fmgers counting out the soft, threaded pesos. When the roosters start, calling to each other across the city, you open your body and fill it with their sound. Another hour and you will hear the swung iron gates, car alarms, flurries of birds, a frenzied dog, the proprietor's merengue, the woman who shouts from the alley, her enunciation slapping like a perch in your hand. What will matter is the tough sun, your pineapple juice, the balcony window, barred. What will be forgotten is just beneath you, your hands limp on the sill, a sudden love for people you do not know, cannot, will never know. Even now, memory is a broken puppet with its strings across your lap. Wait long enough, though, and the mountains come to you. You find their green particular, held apart from the land like a mouth holds its socket of speech, its beak-full of song. 55 ...