1.
Before the Nile ran Upstream
We used to Wade in its Southern hurry
We were morsels to Gravity
Faltering Oxygen
Ballasts
2.
Traveling the fluted plains
of negative affect
I encounter your shadow
holding court over my own
lobster tail sentiments
full of salty soul meat
a buttery, congealed slime
a bucket of crabs
with no name for your objections
dominating each other
a politics of disencounter for
how to hold difference
and indifference at bay-
they surge in and out-
a desert tide.
Your wild palm tree.
My sack of yellow
stacking remembrances
trying not to break the dishes
wedding gifts from long ago
held in abeyance in garages
between San Juan and New York.
Diasporic plates
the fossils of a mother's life-
the daughter's burden.
Thieves! Do not lift this.
I would like to carry them.
Home.
3.
striated longing
my plain white shirt
flute, gyre, gypsy
rolling cart of hope
vagabond hope,
bound to an itinerant despair
a sealed, slithering air
macabre with the call of diseased birds
and in the sunshine yet
the afternoon is hot,
hot & tropical
how humidity can be forlorn
and the torpor too bright
an unbearable fulminescence
a yo-yo,
yo-yo-ing
a dislocated breath ing.
Mumbled- drunk, stumbling into corners
I stub my toe on your discarded pleasantries.
Sending you missives that are
fired at you telepathically
remunerating you with stones
and brindled organisms
brimming with their suffused arrogance
and its implicit fragility.
4.
My reason is wet
but good to play with.
Soggy ethics,
not bound by the strings of some primal guilt
but love exploding
frayed and heavy
above the constriction of
roped penances.
Vulvar resonances-
ignominies of thought, concept, and action.
The uncertainty of rape
the creeping, slow advance of molestation.
One's bewildered silence before it.
The lifeguard from the Westin Bay
Resort
a few miles west of where we are bathing
tries to fondle me in the water where we've met.
His hand grazes my calf but
I am an agile swimmer
and having braced the waves, I get away.
Later he brings me an open coconut
and I drink it
eat the soft, sloppy meat of the fruit,
and slurp the water.
5.
A pack of four wild beasts
-dogs-
scuttles past.
On the street they shuffle,
their night patrol
a thing of the beach.
A latent moon
coconut stares
at salty dog bite.
Rolling waves,
the inscrutable formations of
air-bound pelicans,
amazing floating devices.
The Caribe Hilton has a floating rock-climbing
wall
lolling on their strip of beach
that they bought before Puerto Rico had a Constitution.
Open access. Coconut.
Sexual harassment.
6.
Four dogs,
three in tight formation,
strut past the balconied street.
A fourth lags behind,
bringing up the rear
with less aplomb.
The third dog stops,
waits for the slowest
member of the pack.
Then they
continue
down the street.
7.
What geared, layered rope--
the nestled coves of rubber tires.
Lobster-clawed pants,
corroding on the brain coral.
I'm relieved not to see
-Lola La Picúa-
Great and Fearsome Fish of
El Escambrón Beach
Who had nearly took the right index
finger
off my friend Maritza's hand.
Soft blue jeans appear
less threatening
almost natural and
carbon-based-like
in its underwater weaving,
this worn pair of legs,
undulating forever
Or nearly.
Weaving,
blowing back and forth.
Tendrils, tentacles, testicles,
tubular protuberances,
fishy pinnacles of sedimentation.
I wandered among those peaks and their
underwater swellings
bruised from the waves,
pondering of eternity and subsumption,
scrape my breast on a rock
the thigh fat touched softly
by a glutinous wetness,
the ocean and my waters reconnoitering,
re-encountering, commingling one and the other
open your mouth
and the salty-sweet taste is
so familiar, so intrinsic.
Those bits of melted plastic,
blue jeans, and
beautiful sea-glass
all condensed into a nonsensical pattern--
a rubric, rather more,
a loose web of meaning--
a cultured sea. |
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