When the border was a street
between two towns
sharing a single name,
there were no flags displayed, only
shirts and blouses hung to dry
on the Mexican side.
On an afternoon too still
to turn the windmills’ blades,
a train stood waiting
with the carriage windows open,
and a person drifted
as casually as a coyote wandering
across the line
past the scrub-speckled
hills rising beyond the last house
where the desert still kept
what was its own.
A word called from one side
carried to the other then,
and Spanish
was the lovin’ tongue.
Born in Austria, David Chorlton grew up in Manchester, close to rain and the northern English industrial zone. In his early 20s, he went to live in Vienna and from there, moved to Phoenix in 1978. He has published poems widely in the small press and in individual collections. In 2008, he won the Ronald Wardall Award from Rain Mountain Press for his chapbook The Lost River, and in 2009 the Slipstream Chapbook Competition for From the Age of Miracles. Other poetry collections include Return to Waking Life (Main Street Rag Publishing Company) and Waiting for the Quetzal (March Street Press). The Taste of Fog (Rain Mountain Press) appeared in 2011, his first work of fiction.
Ah! No one can write American poetry like a European!
M