ONCE, A BARBER

            In Peru, along Rio Urubamba, where time invades
the landscape as if it were an army of conquistadors, I met
a man, an old man, 

            clinging to dark rooms with dirt floors and the tick
of the watch that belonged to his father, whose death brought
him back from Lima 

            to the long, slow ache of his mother’s heart—
after which there was no way to leave, not even when she died,
not even when 

            loneliness piled up like dried agave to be burned
as the fuel of his days, while he watched others succumb
to the city’s lure,

            saw the church doors close for the last time
as if they were the folded arms of a man ready for death, 
leaving him

            with only silent companions: a broken sign that proved
he used to be the barber, a plastic bucket half full of water,
one naked electric light;

            a scurry of guinea pigs in the corner kept for stew,
a few leaves of lettuce on a table with their dull green wilting;
the stark adobe walls 

            leaning like lame old women, a worn woolen blanket 
around his shoulders, heavy as the threadbare tangle
of life and death 

            that had captured him somehow, while the Urubamba
flowed on without a thought, and hope hung, suspended, a fleck
of dust in the still, still air. 

Linda Culp Holmes has a B.A. in English literature. During her 26-year career with a government contractor, she wrote proposals for government funding and supervised a staff that managed federally funded science education programs. She has won several awards in poetry from organizations in East Tennessee and has had work published in the Red Branch Review, Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel, and Monterey Poetry Review, among others. Her non-fiction book, If I Am So Lucky: A Portrait of a Man in Perilous Times, 1862-1865 was published by Heritage Books, Inc. in 2023.