San Miguel de Allende

  When you do something, you should burn

  yourself completely, like a good bonfire,

  leaving no trace of yourself.

   --Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Master

--In the face of back rent

I can understand, and praise

your dead-of-night vanishing act,

flawless as a lunar eclipse,

but the promised endings

to your half-told stories (hinting

at absurd fates and fabulous debasement),

vaporize like snubbed apparitions

and tag along behind you.

In your back yard a stump

smolders with the riddle of lightning

slowly, evenly, five days since you left,

looking conspicuously like the gnarled,

cragy-faced branches you used as bookends

and called vajras, harboring forest spirits.

I squint through a bare window

at the ladders and brushes;

Your mangy perro callejero Jezebel,

the Tantric icons, the pile of books,

clothes, boxes of newspapers and your manuscripts,

even Jezebel's stench gone, painted over.

The unnaturally white walls conjure

a whitewashed mission in San Miguel:

You're leaning against an old doorway

holding a decrepit gramophone that blares

Beethoven's "Eroica" (as in your youth)

and muttering prayers to the pagan hordes

incarnate in the maguey and bougainvillea

that bloom beneath a malevolent sun.

Mr. Blodgett