They pose under cypress and pine
next to the old cathedral. The father is fifty.
The mother, slim in a hand-sewn sheath,
might pass for his daughter. The child hugs
a doll half her size. At mass, when Latin drips
yellow and waxy like tapers, she sucks
on its fingers in the pew. What a good girl
says the horrid Spanish grandmother,
yanking her short hair into braids just because
she is hija de muchacha, hija de mujer, born
of a farmer's daughter. For pictures
such as these, the child has learned to smile,
to point one patent-leather shoe aslant
of the other, to sit very still in a stiff-backed
armchair or on a crocheted bedspread
rich with vines and roses. But she knows
the story of the drunken father,
threatening to break every wine glass
when the mother refuses to wait on his table.
The child can name the dusty towns (Bacnotan,
San Juan) where her mother's father plows the difficult soil
to grow rice, okra, and bitter melons. On Sundays
this grandfather puts on his only white suit and Panama hat,
and walks to church in slippers. On her fifth birthday
he gives her a goat, and a chicken whose throat he slits
above the sink before supper. Watch, he says. And years later
she can still see the perfect line scored through the ruff of orange,
black, and red; and the shutter of her eye, opening and closing.
