Saturday Morning in Bogota

The skies are troubled over Bogota. The mountains—sometimes so clear the sight appears a miracle, and you can count the individual pines—are overrun with fog. Under the skies the jungle waits attentive in the rampant grass that listens for the rain; the white and yellow and orange flowers in the trees and bushes and ascending creepers mark and emphasize in the uncertain light; above the brooding, shaggy eucalypti slightly sway and seem to wait. The pines alone do not expect; they guard their shadows behind green cataracts, impassive in the quiet air.

A light sprinkle begins, a gentle and dismissed descent of acid drops to wash away our clothes and skin and leave behind the urban bones.

* * *
In the bakery the tables are occupied or rest uncleared: all bottles with protruding straws and baskets with their rumpled, wadded napkins and scattered plates and crumbs. A Lada crosses into traffic in front of a Renault annoying a Hyundai followed by a Chevrolet. The usual Nissan in the space before the door was gone and left a momentary Skoda. In a jumpsuit and tall rubber boots a man on a bicycle threads his way around pedestrians on uneven, dirty sidewalks full of buying, selling, going, coming.

The concrete jungle in these tropics passively resists and rises out of the vegetable jungle. Black diesel smoke engulfs the sidewalks and the trees in toxic, evanescent clouds, but from the hills come cool, damp winds, and the quiet invasion of the rain, to wash and rinse and nurture growth.