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  • Dream Highway, and: Letters from La Paz
  • Diane Thiel (bio)

Dream Highway

Dream about it just like that hesitating long enough past the center to forget which direction you are heading

Dart back quick Don’t panic One with crystal eyes runs over runs you through and then you are a skin- flap in the wind

You do it every day you do that highway run across up on a pole and wave that skin and flag them down and when they stop you swallow whole generations taste the salt

a siren on a stick

I don’t choose to think of it it chooses me and leaps out constantly jack-is-in-the-box [End Page 157] with jewels for eyes and waits for me

to close my eyes into this nightmare dream a man is waiting there with crystal eyes he offers blind and on a pin.

Letters from La Paz

1 La Paz, Bolivia

What higher hillside could I ever find to roll these poems down to where you are listening for them each night under stars and the growing moon, full in two days’ time. I can hear the children’s voices echo in the schoolyard. They sound like birds singing.

In this town, on market streets, you can find wings of flamingos, fetuses of llamas to be wrapped in silver paper for spells, a thousand stories woven into cloths the colors of birds, the pink of lovers, the green so prayed for in these mountains, [End Page 158] in these songs, the textures of this hillside, this mountain, this moon, rolling down to you.

2 Festival De La Virgen De Urkupina, Cochabamba, Bolivia

Once every year in the heart of August, the people throng to find the Virgin here, to dance the devil dances in her name, to climb Kalbario to crack off rocks for luck, to read their fortunes in the lines inside the rocks, to find the figure of the Virgin in the veins, to map their lives their histories, their futures, to pile rocks as altars, to place their wishes, manifest in paper money, toy trucks, dollhouses, effigies of lovers, all in miniature plastic miracles the people believe and pour the chicha in the heart of rocks, brought home in plastic bags to bless the year.

3 Cuzco, Peru

In the parade, the people wear histories over their shoulders and dance in the streets, dressed in Spanish moss or wrapped in the skin of a mountain lion or the body of a condor hollowed out to costume a young boy—whose role is to move between the dancers like a ghost, a spirit bird between two worlds. He is learning English in school. Sundays he goes to Catholic church, and he lights a candle for his mother, and he lights another for the condor he will wear that Sunday like a body [End Page 159] wrapped around his secret voice—his heart passed in skins, in feathers, scales, in human form.

4 Isla Del Sol, Lago Titicaca, Bolivia

The full moon is returning to the lake, this half-heart-shaped bay in this ancient sea. Out of this half circle window, the sky turning flamingo pink in memory of the birds that once filled the air with wings, of ceremonies made to the sun’s birth and death at the birth of each moon. This one will die soon. It has reached its fullest point on this lake as big as a sea, this moment as long as an hour, long as a life spent where you can feel the shape of the earth around you like a body, move with you like centuries move around these ruin walls in streaks of sun and moon unchanged by time. [End Page 160]

Diane Thiel

Diane Thiel is the author of six books of poetry, and her new textbook, Winding Roads: Exercises in Writing Creative Nonfiction, is forthcoming. Her work appears in numerous journals, including Poetry and the Sewanee Review.

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