Every time
we load bananas
a young girl with a stained shirt
and undomesticated eyes
traces our wake
downriver.
This is where I feel like a pirate
retreating with captured bounty.
She remains
after we round the bend
and stars set in the sky,
despite her mother’s dinner call
from the warm yellow square
cut into the side
of her stilted grass hut.
Someday the girl will climb
the wooden plank
into this unhygienic boat,
knot a hammock
between rusted poles
as if they were saplings,
and float into the material world.
Here I wonder if she will look upriver
the same way she looked downriver.
We will exchange
a suspicious glance
in Lima’s Plaza de Armas, perhaps,
as I almost call out to her
before realizing
we were never friends,
that I don’t know her name.
Maybe she will serve me coffee in an L.A. cafe
that some future friend
insists we visit
when I come to town on business.
The napkin-scratched letter
left below a heavy tip
will confess my admiration—
my European
original sin apology
too long and awkward
for the cheap one-ply paper cloth
that may or may not
have been her childhood playground.
Now its appropriate, I feel, to give her a name.
I’ll call her Maria
as I linger on the lonely
thought that destiny may be a line from A to B,
that sometimes the boat doesn’t arrive.
LOCATION: Iquitos, Peru
