From Javier's perspective, the gardener who sleeps in the property's
ruined chapel, we must have seemed off our rockers, and maybe at the moment
of our dance he wished for a wife, a witness to call to his window
to see the American women, a couple of decades from infirmity and maybe
death, running barefoot across the grass of the ruined estate
to tag the shoulder or arm of another with an urgency
that made a leg-pumping, arm flailing cartoon of the evening.
Maybe he wished for a camera to record the tableau of tagged, 
frozen women framed, no tangled, in the pomegranate tree.
What cultural truth could he have gleaned from this odd display?
And what were we running for or from anyway? Not each other. 
And after we exhausted ourselves, we fell where we stood to quiet our hearts
which seemed like they might hammer their way out of our chests.
And poor Javier. Bodies scattered on his tended grass. What story 
could he tell? And our story? Brief exhilaration and then back to
the slow wrap-up of our lives, equipped with what? A glimpse backward 
to girlhood, then a push forward to a preview of our physical bodies 
sinking into, being absorbed by, the damp, accommodating earth. 

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