SOLITARY REFINEMENT

After teaching English to seven beaming and recalcitrant students in the morning:

Up the hill to the edge of town, 

to the cemetery vaults, 

the maze of familiar names, Robles Sanchez Mejia Ochoa, 

children are playing sliding down slanted burial vaults, 

visiting the park with ancestors to greet you, 

high above Huaraz, looking down, 

what color is Huaraz, this red brown corrugated canvas of houses,

sprawling below, seemingly contented 

explosions and piercing flutes of those practicing for tonight, 

yet another evening in the Señor de la Soledad celebration, the drums, 

and in the distance, the snow-covered Cordillera Blanca, impassive, 

daring you not to gasp in awe at their majesty, day after day

the likely rain of the afternoon en route 

as augured by the darkened clouds approaching

the christ of loneliness

this festival welcomes me

the lone traveler, widowed, 

walking with ghosts in the graveyard, on the streets, in life

to be solitary and never alone

holding hands with those passed away

the placid Bodhisattva amid the excited tourists, 

blotting their noise and letting the rays of centuries 

of power and mind swoop past them, 

over and around their Teflon pre-packaged vacations,

the daytripping noisemakers 

and, thunk! sink like perfectly aimed arrows into my heart, 

my lonely heart, my empty heart

taking each piercing, blinding truth with a gulp

saint sebastian of the quotidian banalities

the day, the month, the season 

disappearing from consciousness

from the need to know

with the clocks mostly stopped

my hiking shoes washed 

by Miguel in the Plaza de Armas 

with his box of brushes and polishes

the mud removed 

the dung streams of 16000 feet of altitude

where one survives by

practicing falling, calling it sitting

knowing how to collapse on these rocks, 

alone and free to fall, fall,

far from the old new world abandoned 

to its sins and quarrels,

testing the resiliency of knees 

denying their age

with perfect wonderment