Church of Puerto Vallarta

Under the rich-soiled mountains vestured in jungle reigns the fiberglass crown of La Iglesia de Guadalupe, and above the wrinkled pink ocean and sunset with the bay horizon broken by cruise ships and frigate birds reigns the brick belfry of la Iglesia de Guadalupe. Two gray ropes attached to the bells issue onto the street, and squat nuns in crisp habits will let urchins pull them sometimes and ring out the wordless paternoster through the cobblestone streets to the prostitute who seeks out work after dark in an orange tube top, false lashes, and high heels, and to the gringo tourist entering the Planet Hollywood for sangrías if they’ve got them but a beer otherwise, and to that Mexican fisherman in his small boat passing the crowded malecón downtown with the statue of the boy astride the seahorse, to that Mexican fisherman who had with the white parachute of the first parasailer he had ever seen mistaken it, a moment only, for the dusk moon – he saw the rope then and the minute figure hanged against the white, in airborne freedom, a boy from America astride the sky, exhilarated, hanging. But his boat was passing south. In the stern was the cooler with the cold gold cerveza and some freshly-dead fish stuffed in beside the bottles, a complementary touch of silver to the plastic treasure chest, southbound passing Playa Los Muertos on the ocean freeway, drinking and driving, trolling the lines for atún maybe, southbound passing Los Arcos islands like muffins buttered with bushes and lime grass in the sun but near black now with dusk now passing the holes straight through the islands with bats in them that the tourists gawk at when they drive through in glass-bottomed boats, between the bats and the parrot fish, the bats and the angel fish. South through night growls the boat to its bed, the fishing village of La Boca de Tomatlán, to rest under the rich-soiled mountains vestured in jungle. And upon the platinum beach sits the fisherman above the ocean from which the drowned half moon shines out to have its light scattered by the faceted surface above, which he does not focus his eyes on directly but rather only looks ahead and lets come what may to his mind: maybe he’d make more money giving rides to parasailers rather than to fisherman? And if you don’t focus or notice the three-dimensional contours of the ocean but only see the surface, the moonlight in each transient facet of the wave looks like stars, or he might think fireflies if he has ever seen them before, but he has not, so stars it is, and the facets are always vanishing and coming into existence with the advancing of the wave, like a lighted sign in Vegas, so the brain mistakes blinking for movement – the stars are moving, more frenzied toward the shore where they hit the universe’s edge and die with the soft lullaby crash of the wave. Or is it like white dots on a black monitor, location and luminosity predetermined by a program?... which he might have asked if he’d ever seen a computer before. He did feel all these things, even if he did not know them, as the prostitute picked up her purse and went to find work on the malecón, where the drunk gringo tourist just leaving the Planet Hollywood intercepted her, and they left for a really cheap room in the Zona Romántica as time itself issued from the belfry with the song of the bells of La Iglesia de Guadalupe, her crown of fiberglass.