Punta de Mita
by Lynne Procope
Today, when I can’t remember appetite,
let me write this down: deep hunger
of the ocean, the body sinks, dance of drowning,
lift of salt, the buoyant torso, flail of limbs,
the desperate kick. When finally we leave
the Pacific’s sliding rough sand chafes my feet
and sloughs away the skin. I believe I am both
beautiful and invisible. The sun so close to Cancer
makes me black enough to be myself again.
We turn toward the sea. Our mouths seek salt.
Our wounds divide and heal. Our poisons depart
despite how close we clutch them.
Returning to the seclusion of Punta Mita
we take our time through small perishing towns
crowding Bahia de Banderas. Adam and I turn
from the single pitiless highway, its ‘resorts’
of cruel plastic colors reassuring touristas
that here, finally, they’ve found paradise. In Bucerias
we search for fresh meat or fish. No one believes us
when we say we’ll cook our own. They point us
to the restaurants full of sunburnt white men
in dark glasses and slender young mexicanas- waiting.
We worship the sun at each turn, ramble
back streets, alone with the strays, children,
and viejas sitting silent in the doorways.
Men watch me, my skin darker than theirs,
my Spanish too clean, the man beside me clear eyed,
smiling, and American. In Cruz de Huanacaxtle;
the sign, an oyster bar, a road first asphalt, then
crumbling, then dirt. Past roadside carts selling
tamales and fried fish tortas, past a starving horse
tethered in the wreck strewn field and a single boy,
his undersized shirt riding the small swell of his belly,
eyes trained on the dust we make, lifting his futbol
over and over. Turn after turn we go down, searching,
and then past the broken husk of a house of God
the road dips to the sea and Osos’.
Inside we ask impossible questions, we’d never ask
at home. Can we buy fish here, raw and fresh from
the bay glittering just beyond the tables? The waiters
respond as waiters never would in New York (where
one imagines one could have anything, but this is
never true.) They call the owner and we laze half dressed
in still wet swim suits, among the stray dogs and hordes
of tiny black flies, sipping margaritas, cervesas,
and bottled water. Oso comes, wonders how we’ll cook,
where, what kind of fish. Adam explains,
we’ll take anything. I drag up atun, or huachinango.
He smiles: perhaps.
We order platas of buttery sweet oysters in deep
salt crusted cups. We consume like secret tourists;
thoughtless save the salt lick on the tongue,
the rocky bivalve kiss, full of brine, the splatter
of lime, red chili and pico, the sweet slip of ripe
mangos. We suck it all down. Our eyes take it all in;
the bright red meat of the tuna and the perfect pale
green and soft yellow of aguacate piled high
and soaked in citrus. We try every ceviche.
We are all greed and joy and our American mouths.
The owner brings us the promised bags full
of tuna and red snapper. These too are piled high,
pounds of it, just in from the boats bobbing so close
in the bay that we will walk out to see them pull in;
the nets full of fat oysters and wriggling fish.
We’ll come again and again, watch the sunsets turn
every boat, jetty and stone a trick of golden pink or
orange, shades so perfect we think, at last,
we’ve found our place in the middle, our paradise.
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