If he turns the guns on the teachers,
the students will again learn the lesson
taught by men with guns
to students with pencils.

It’s octubre, the Mexican season of massacre.
Every year on the night of the second
a long shudder rolls up the rocky spine
of the continental divide
from somewhere in Chiapas near the sea
through Oaxaca and Puebla down into
the volcano valley of México

from La Plaza de Tres Culturas to Los Pinos
–the Mexican White House–where it stops.
Walking the streets just after sunset
one can see the ghosts of flares
lingering in the purgatory sky like homeless smoke.

Soon after, the bone-bass of helicopter blades
returns to the air like distant thunder,
and looking up, there are machetes spinning
above a metallic cloud of sharp angles
from which the strong rain of bullets came.

That was almost forty years ago. 1968.
Forty years doesn’t seem so long ago
in octubre.

In Los Pinos, behind a large desk,
a presidente in his final days doesn’t feel
as if forty years is so long ago,
thinking about the teachers and their strike,
the teachers and their graffiti,
the teachers and their raised torches,
the teachers and their sacking of a capital city,
the teachers and their demands,
the teachers and their long, long summer.

His long fingers find the metal
revolver he keeps in the wide drawer
above his long legs. He picks it up.
He puts it down. He picks up a heavy telephone.

Blood drips from his right ear
from violent conservative cries.

Blood drops from his left ear
from the teachers and their chants,
and from the parallel government flanking his left.

His long face looks old, he raises white handkerchiefs
to both ears, and both come away with a blood portrait
of Díaz Ordaz–the presidente from forty years prior.
Outside, the press screams through the windows.

Will Presidente Fox massacre the teachers?
Even as they march from Oaxaca,
across some three hundred miles of cactus
and thick politics, a Mexican flag at their front?
Or will he leave unfinished business
for the next politico from his party?

Here in México they say–among other things–that
uno se convierte en aquello que estudia–one becomes that which one studies.

As the long days of octubre wear on, we wonder
if Fox studies Díaz Ordaz,
if the teachers study Castro,
if the sky remembers what bullets feel like
as they cut little lines through it…

we wonder
what will ever come of it?
Will Presidente Fox massacre the teachers?