The Years Between

Hear what the years did — the long slow years, the waiting years, the four-and-twenty between the fire and the leaving.
Garachico did not die. A town almost never dies outright.
It thins. A roof goes unmended. A shutter stays shut.
A boat is sold. A daughter is not dowried, and does not wed.
The old grow older in it — and the young, the young stand at the dead black harbor and look hard at the water, and the water, every year, says back the same word: elsewhere.
And the islands did what the islands have always done with their hunger: they put it on a ship — to Havana, to Caracas, to wherever a sail would carry a poor man toward the rumor of a wage.
One cart, and then another, went down the coast road loaded, and a boy at a harness-bench watched each of them to the turning.
Far off — past the sea-line, where the kings keep their weather — the long war guttered out; the maps were drawn again, and smaller; and Spain, its edges trimmed, looked hard at what it still held, and at the raw far rim of that, a country it scarcely held at all — Texas: grass, and a river, and a French neighbor leaning on the door.
A fort, the King was told, can hold ground but cannot keep it.
Ground is kept by families — by a plow, a roof, a christening, a grave.

So in the plazas of four poor islands a paper would be nailed, promising the poor, in the oldest words a crown still owned, a name.
But that is ahead. Begin in the waiting. Begin in the quiet town: the boy grown tall and restless at the bench, the awl gone easy in his hand, the harbor full of stone, the road full of leaving carts — and the want in him rising, year over year, with nowhere yet to go.