He sang like a gun.
He knew salt
and how to coax it from a bundle of rags with a long wooden pole.
When he laid down
he was so still children bit him.
César Vallejo’s arm is dead
and so are both of the eyes that starved in the Luxembourg Gardens,
wondering at the polished brass tips on its fence’s
wrought-iron bars.
As ladies’ little dogs shit around his feet,
he dreamt of snapping those bars off
to carry home to Santiago de Chuco and hand to miners as
they emerged from the pits,
their faces white with the tungsten powder that leaked from
straw baskets they shouldered up ladders
lashed together with strips of cloth they’d torn from their
own pants.