Allegories

El ancla de este sueño abre mis ojos a la vida.
Juan Sánchez Peláez


constance city, compact city of mine
poet living in Palos Grandes at the foot

of El Avila, this city uncolonized though
only in print occasionally, even-metered

—te imaginas, Guillo? when the Spanish
first reached Monte Avila, looking into

the uncut valley below, whose Guaire
would have been translucent then

unlike our

currents, tribal fracture
mientras tanto across the river

desde Caurimare in the early 1980s
who wrote these allegories above

my unawareness, childhood sped-up
Capital, trans-Caribbean

study