Poems for Infidels

A Tour of Someone Else’s Hometown

25 A Tour of Someone Else’s Hometown Rosario, Argentina, for Raquel, because the physical presence of a place always strikes me as a kind of annulment of the absences which are its true selves . . . The sky is green over Montevideo. The sky of Buenos Aires is gray. Our sky, here in Rosario, is always translucent and turquoise. The trees of Shantytown are drunk. The golden age is over. Here is our one truly French boulevard. Here is the work of art commissioned by the Independents before the foreigners came. We are known for our ghosts here: they lie around in the old port; they sunbathe on the river Paraná; they sleep in the cemetery of the prostitutes. These are the statues carved by Lola Mora, the President’s mistress. (They were banished from the capitol by allies of the President’s wife.) Here are our prisons. (When the wind blows ghosts here cry out the litanies of their punishments.) But those days, too, are long over. This is the flower called alelí. This is the Socialist mayor with a giant thumb. 26 See that gray stone tenement? Che Guevara was born there. See those roses? People say they symbolize his wounds which like dumb mouths opened their ruby lips as he died silently, and so far away from his childhood hauntings: a bleeding piece of earth amid uncomprehending greenery. This is our park. These are our unemployment statistics. This is the hotel a famous person stayed in. I like to finish with a quote from William Shakespeare: Who is here so vile that will not love his city? ...