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Church of Puerto Vallarta (Free verse) by James Rykelangeli
Under the rich-soiled mountains vestured in jungle
reigns the fiberglass crown of La Iglesia de Guadalupe,
and above the wrinkled pink ocean and sunset
with the bay horizon broken by cruise ships and frigate birds
reigns the brick belfry of la Iglesia de Guadalupe.
Two gray ropes attached to the bells issue onto the street,
and squat nuns in crisp habits will let urchins pull them sometimes
and ring out the wordless paternoster through the cobblestone streets
to the prostitute who seeks out work after dark
in an orange tube top, false lashes, and high heels,
and to the gringo tourist entering the Planet Hollywood
for sangrÃas if theyâve got them but a beer otherwise,
and to that Mexican fisherman in his small boat passing
the crowded malecón downtown with the statue
of the boy astride the seahorse, to that Mexican fisherman
who had with the white parachute of the first
parasailer he had ever seen mistaken it, a moment only,
for the dusk moon â he saw the rope then
and the minute figure hanged against the white, in airborne freedom,
a boy from America astride the sky, exhilarated, hanging.
But his boat was passing south. In the stern
was the cooler with the cold gold cerveza
and some freshly-dead fish stuffed in beside the bottles,
a complementary touch of silver to the plastic treasure chest,
southbound passing Playa Los Muertos on the ocean freeway,
drinking and driving, trolling the lines for atún maybe,
southbound passing Los Arcos islands like muffins buttered with
bushes and lime grass in the sun but near black now with
dusk now passing the holes straight through the islands with bats in
them
that the tourists gawk at when they drive through in glass-bottomed
boats,
between the bats and the parrot fish, the bats and the angel fish.
South through night growls the boat to its bed,
the fishing village of La Boca de Tomatlán,
to rest under the rich-soiled mountains vestured in jungle.
And upon the platinum beach sits the fisherman
above the ocean from which the drowned half moon shines out
to have its light scattered by the faceted surface above,
which he does not focus his eyes on directly
but rather only looks ahead and lets come what may
to his mind: maybe heâd make more money giving rides
to parasailers rather than to fisherman?
And if you donât focus or notice the three-dimensional
contours of the ocean but only see the surface,
the moonlight in each transient facet of the wave
looks like stars, or he might think fireflies
if he has ever seen them before, but he
has not, so stars it is, and the facets
are always vanishing and coming into existence
with the advancing of the wave, like a lighted sign
in Vegas, so the brain mistakes blinking for movement â
the stars are moving, more frenzied toward the shore
where they hit the universeâs edge and die
with the soft lullaby crash of the wave.
Or is it like white dots on a black monitor,
location and luminosity predetermined by a program?...
which he might have asked if heâd ever seen a computer before.
He did feel all these things, even if he did not know them,
as the prostitute picked up her purse and went to find work
on the malecón, where the drunk gringo tourist just leaving the Planet
Hollywood
intercepted her, and they left for a really cheap room in the Zona
Romántica
as time itself issued from the belfry with the song of the bells
of La Iglesia de Guadalupe, her crown of fiberglass.
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Arithmetic Mean: 4.5
Weighted score: 4.976287
Overall Rank: 8230
Posted: April 6, 2005 4:27 PM PDT; Last modified: April 6, 2005 4:27 PM PDT
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