Every month or two, the army came to burn these homes. The people watched. Then they came back, because they did not know where else to live. One old man asked the army what they should do, but the army did not know.
Whenever it rained hard enough that the train policemen could not see, the people leaped onto the factory trains to steal cardboard bales. Some of it they used to make houses, and the rest they sold.
(The toilets were also cardboard boxes. When they became filled, the people built others.)
In a sense the people had a desperate kind of freedom. Nothing was theirs, and so they could never lose it. Their houses could not eat them. Roofed with corrugated metal, those improvised dwellings an arm's length from the hot and sunny tracks swelled full of puppies, chickens and bright laundry. The railroad was like a street walled with cardboard and planks, curving as the tracks curved.
A dirty little boy in galoshes that came up to his knees was laughing. A man approached slowly, carrying baskets of water for his family. Children peered from the rusty stalls between houses. They played on the tracks. Little girls walked brown-legged in skirts. Their clothes were very clean. A beautiful woman with a blouse that shone like metal came running down the tracks. She ran past a house whose walls were made of tires. She ran past the wall of rusty iron where someone had scratched a round and happy face with big breasts. Laundry blew in the wind. The black slits of darkness between trousers and dresses expanded and contracted with the wind. The woman ran from tie to tie with easy grace, not needing to look down anymore. She was coming home. She ran to a house of cardboard where her mother sat in the doorway, smiling to see her come.
A week later the army arrived. When they had finished, the boy in galoshes wept. I want to go home.
Our home is everywhere, the woman comforted him. Don't cry. Come help me and my mother. I'll teach you how to build a house.
Your little skull's a light-globe to help my shadow lead me as you did when I was your brother, older than you but small like you, afraid of the toilet's cool skull-gape at night. You always held my hand. Now please take me down the slippery dark path, down between the crowds of palms to the lava-walled, frond-curtained river of broad and rapid waterfalls. Until now I've scrubbed at the stain of your face on my brain's floor, your sky, your headstone — I never wanted you to come back! But whenever you did (your ghost some ignored dog to raise itself hopefully at every word), I convinced myself that you loved me most, because when I thought of you I thought of you alone. Can't you understand that I'm afraid of you? (You're only
Under your moldy stone, you radicate where the lava's tapestried with mossy crotches, ferns, leaves (dark and pale) so subdivided into heart-leaflets as to baffle my eyes. Within all this fineness, almost as fine as the humid air, I find something finer still, a spiderweb on whose lattices hang a huge yellowbodied spider, vertical, legs wide and strong, waiting. Closing my screams with phosphorite consolations of words that hiss out like hollow jets of flame, I uncrumble your chamber's riddled copper to reach you lying in the black dirt's guts. I sweep back your hair, breach your skullhelm in the muggish air. From behind your hinges and bismite-yellow pivots the crimson spider scuttles out. He rushes on his sister with a bravery as bitter as camphor, determined to gnaw her as I once effaced you with my exclusionary conceit. But the golden one snaps him up. His legs fib-rillate. A single crimson droplet tumbles from strand to strand, is drunk by my warrant now validated:
They told me to take care because you were littler, but I forgot. Brawny ropes of water captured you. The fishes asked to drink your gurgling breaths. The mud asked to kiss your eyes. The sand asked to fiD your mouth. The weeds asked to sprout inside your ears. Outside the night skull, a tunnel of blue light led you to India. Inside the night skull, your blood became cold brown water.
They said: Where's your sister?
They said: Where's your sister?
When the sea draws away from lava-islands, a thousand rills of white run down, like Grandfather's hair-roots. When the water dribbled out of you as the desperate divers breathed into your mouth, each drop was whitish-blue with the lymph of your death.
