A View of Heaven

On a night of clouds, in the middle of the city that struggles in its lust for space to break the valleys or create new ones, we scale the hill amidst the press. Atop the rise hails a 300 ft flag pole like a telephone line to God. I guess they don't know him very well, becaue he talks to me in the supermarket sometimes. The brick court yard around the pole holds many people at bay who would fly out over the city where the lights stretch to where they blend together to make waves of civil electricity. We come because the stars have died under a shroud of smog and city glow--ironic. The million tiny shining points look like jars of light, carefully packed in a storehouse of God's creation, ready to be flung up into the sky. There's a planet next to that galaxy. Or maybe they're angels fallen from heaven, but not the good kind. For in their pride they have stolen the real stars and pretended to look like them. I wonder who died in the city tonight alongside the glowing towers of concrete.

Outside the city, older towers glow with purer light. The white rocks of Huasteca reach up higher than la bandera en la colina. The crystaline rocks leap straight up hundreds of feet all around us like enormous salt formations. They add flavor to the barren mountains in the surrounding area. Bits of rock, fallen from the surrounding cliffs, are worn round by an ancient river that no longer flows through the valley. A horse races by, the stones sound like ancient clattering voices under the horse's hooves. In the nearby dessert, on the edge of a barren plain, high on the face of a grim mountain, gapes the mouth of a humbler world: a world of wonders burried in darkness. Grutas de Garcia reveal the secret of a hollow mountain, the wonder of empty space where rock should be. I guess more than purification happened during Noah's day. Now, after years, ages, men, cities, nations, births of paupers and emperors, wars and the day's bit of gossip that changed someone's world, the caverns remain: ever dripping, ever shifting in a slow, mineral slide of bulbous rock. Little dark patches look at me between the stalagmites or from under a twisted brown formation of crooked stone as if indifferently daring any rare creature who passes to discover its secrets beyond.

Every day, I get ready to go to work by eight o'clock. Homero picks me up and we start the day off with a whirl in the van. We work till lunch, then sup on tortillas and beans. After he leaves me at two, I am left to fend for myself against the onslaught of more than twenty niños cansados. The day oozes like black tar in the summer sun. I know every minute intimately. All I can think of is leaving. But the end mocks me from an unassailable possition in the future called seven thirty. But these days do not last forever.

None of these things last. The city lights go out in the glare of the sun and some day they will disappear entirely. No cavern or mountain or sea will remain unchanged. But one place remains. It shines like an eternal surprise: a kinder egg that never ends.