Xochimilco is a real place, a district of canals and floating gardens in the south of Mexico City, and the poem opens by naming it as if announcing a destination. But it quickly turns the postcard inside out. Norman McLeod gives us a city of flowers that is also a city of decomposition, and the poem's central idea is that beauty and decay are not opposites here but neighbours, even partners. Death is present, but it is "lidded," held down for a moment, until life breaks through again.
The most striking thing about the poem is how it handles sound. The first lines are about hearing rather than seeing: a "bell clear atmosphere" envelops the wind "in silos of sound." The image is odd and memorable. A silo stores grain, so the wind is being gathered and kept, as though sound were a harvest. The word "envelops" makes the air feel like a soft container. Later the "silence momentary rings / Into the cupped blue sky," a paradox that lets silence ring like a bell. The sky becomes a cupped hand or bowl catching that ringing. Throughout, the poem treats the senses as slightly mixed up, so that air can be clear like a bell and silence can have a tone.
Then comes the water. The canals "mirror murky / Miraculous form decompositions." The two adjectives, murky and miraculous, sit side by side and share their opening sound, which quietly yokes the dirty and the wonderful together. What the water reflects are "form decompositions," a deliberately clinical phrase that sounds more like a laboratory than a garden. Yet the flowers "refresh themselves / With casual moisture," as though they were not troubled in the least. The word "casual" is a nice touch: nature goes about its business without any sense of drama, drinking from the same water that mirrors rot.
The fifth stanza-like movement of the poem, "Bloom of corrupted flowers / Over imaginary mounds," is the darkest and the most puzzling. The "mounds" are called imaginary, and the poem suggests, though it never says outright, that they may be graves or heaps of decay that exist more in the mind than on the ground. Then comes the clipped, almost gasping phrase "death lidded." There is no verb to hold it up, so the idea hangs there, like a lid closing over the scene. The syntax is deliberately loose throughout, with phrases stacked beside one another rather than joined into tidy sentences, and this matches the way the poem works: by juxtaposition rather than explanation.
Structurally, the poem is free verse. There is no regular rhyme scheme and no steady metre, and the lines vary in length, which lets the rhythm drift the way a boat might on a canal. What holds it together instead is repetition and framing. The name "Xochimilco, city of flowers" appears at the very beginning and again in the final line, so the poem begins and ends in the same place, but with a difference. By the second time we say it, we know what the flowers are floating on. The phrase has acquired shadows. The ending also resolves the earlier tension: "the warmer commentaries / Of life break through." Here the warmth of human voices, or simply of living things, interrupts the cool, held silence of death. "Commentaries" is a wonderfully dry word for what are presumably chatter and noise, as if life were an ongoing running remark on everything around it.
What makes the poem worth reading is that it refuses the easy choice. It could have been a pretty description of flowers or a gloomy meditation on mortality. Instead it keeps both in the frame at once and lets the reader feel how strange that is. The poem suggests that a place can be lovely precisely because it is in the process of breaking down and renewing itself, and that silence, however beautiful, is always temporary. The poem leaves us listening, as the flowers seem to, for the moment when ordinary life starts up again.