The Exchange: Oaxaca, Mexico.

The Exchange: Oaxaca, Mexico

... they placed them on some rather narrow stones which had been
prepared as places for sacrifice, and with stone knives they sawed open
their chests and drew out their palpitating hearts ...
--Bernal Diaz del Castillo
The Discovery and Conquest of Mexico

   It is a simple story:
   I'm in Mexico drinking
   hot milk with coffee
   when a girl comes to my table
   with gardenias to sell.

   A simple story:
   shoeless, maybe six years old,
   she holds out her hand,
   "Please buy it, mister"--
   fifty pesos (not even a dime)
   for one gardenia which I buy.
   The meeting the exchange
   the terms for peace.
   At this table in the plaza.
   In the surf of that first island,
   Columbus' trinity of ships
   anchored against the sky.
   At the gates of Tenochtitlan--
   Moctezuma trying to appease Cortes
   with a moon made of silver
   and a sun of hammered gold--just enough
   to keep his hot greed glowing.

   It is a simple story:
   in my hand money,
   in hers a flower:
   white handprints of death on doors,
   hands brown as coffee with milk,
   the bitter and the sweet.
   It is a story of looks exchanged
   there in the plaza:
   my eyes blue as the horizon
   of the sixteenth century,
   her yes black as the scalloped edge
   of the stone knife held
   ready to saw open the chest.

   A simple story:
   one white gardenia bought,
   and the living rose beneath my ribs,
   beating and beating--scathed, unscathed.

Matthew Murrey has been published in various journals and is the recipient of an NEA grant. His first manuscript, "Lonely Tombs," is seeking a publisher. He works as a high school librarian in Urbana, Illinois.