Carrying Capacity

There was a woman sketching mountains,
her feet wadding in rings of waves.

She moved like a silver print and I couldn’t help
but ask her story, and she said:

empanada and Patagonia, said rain forest and Santiago—
we cook our own food and do maid work.

Then her hand drew the long way
home to the Andes as she said visa

and the luck of the draw who go north, who fly-fish,
like her partner now, a breath away, tossing out neon

line in loops, his toes flexing over the woodrot and rust.
Life is a wet surface.

Her blonde hair through a needle-broke sun,
how voices carry over water—