Snapshot

  El Salvador, 2008

A poet in a busload of poets, 
I write the name of the town 
the tour guide offers: Aguacayo. 
Travel books give it brief mention,

alongside Guazapa, the sleeping 
volcano we drive up to get here, 
past holes in its side guerillas gouged 
to shoot from, past a bookshop

guarded by a man with a machine 
gun, small shacks of cinderblocks,
shells of buildings grown through
with weeds. “The army never gained

control of it,” the guide grins. 
There is the talk of friends, uncles 
disappeared, impossible to translate 
because in English one disappears,

is not disappeared. This morning 
we climbed a pyramid, a heap 
of stone and scrub, dedicated 
to the Great Flayed One, where

enemies’ skins were worn inside 
out after sacrifice. We take turns 
snapping photos of each other 
at the top, then on to Sochitoto,

where we find a postcard heart,
huge and veined, jutting up 
as a church spire. In the park
I shoot a shrine: the tail

of a helicopter brought down 
by snipers, its missile fixed 
below it, prey in a taloned claw, 
always about to, but still not

dropping it over this pristine, 
colonial town, where kids giggle 
at dogs fucking, locked together 
as they strain to come unstuck,

while a thin girl swings a Kermit 
the Frog doll. Here in Aguacayo,
no town, no tourists, just a few men 
leaning in thresholds and us poets,

scribbling notes. Ivy outside 
of what was a church refuses 
to root inside, three decades 
after a bomb flattened all

who took shelter. Only the floor, 
bits of wall, remain, the elevation 
of what must have been the altar. 
A camera flashes in the ash

of twilight. The men look up 
from their card game, the deck 
thick with dust. I turn away 
to stop them from watching me

watch them, framed by debris, 
and look back at my daughter
who tries to walk through the ruins, 
but wobbles, plops—not quite grown

enough to balance. She bends
forward, pats the ground 
with her palms, taps her dirt-
covered fingers to her tongue.

— andy young