       |
Poetry
The
Tropical Mind
In
Summer (Its Only Season)
Day has never been longer---a nice bonus
if you're away from home:
If
you're away from where
day stays the same
from January through December,
always leaving before dinnertime,
though never leaving cold. (And yet
can you ever be really away
if the same humid air
that sticks to your toes
has stuck to your mind?) Now
you shower in the freshness
and newness of late evening sunlight
browning your already-bronzed
skin, dyeing your black hair crimson,
and you thought
that where skin or hair
are lighter than yours,
the weather's always cold,
that your life's orbit
had a monopoly of heat
and sun. And you didn't expect
to feel so warm, so free
in a new country,
and so far
from the same humidity---
the only air you ever knew
---so soon.
In
Autumn
You worry that the day is getting shorter
and shorter.
And yet when else can you capture
the cry of sunset in a pile of leaves?
Lying on the earth
as if steeped
in their own blood, yet not
looking sadder
than when they were
still hanging,
like the Christmas lanterns
in your lush tropical garden
that swung to a sultry
late November wind.
They fall
or fly
then fall again,
yellow spades
dealt out
in your head for the first time
with burgundy
hearts and pointed
flying clubs---
oracles
of an apocalypse never imagined
by your now autumn-gilded
tropical mind
which thought that life should
almost always be
green
In Winter
Implore the heavens
to give you the meaning
of barrenness.
*
Do not retreat into the warmth
of the Nativity, into its unchanging
truth. Go beyond yourself.
*
Pray for the tenacious leaf
about to be seduced from the branch
by the capricious wind.
*
Weep not for the leaf,
but weep for the tree abandoned
by the leaves that once clung to it.
*
Beg the sky for your very first snowfall.
Plead that the snow
may clothe the naked trees.
*
That it may conceal
the faded green
of the vain grass.
*
That its brightness may hide
the hardness
of the once flowing lake.
*
Let it bury everything
that had warmth, life, meaning.
Let it now be your sun.
*
Embrace whiteness while it is there,
the brightness your bright tropical mind
had been denied.
In
Spring
You thought brown was the color
of doomed manila hemp
but today
the brown grass gathered
green from blue sky and light
yellow sun, bundling all with a rain finish.
These are mornings to live for:
when the dead come back to life
in the pink laughter of the weeping
cherry.
These are mornings you would die for.
A leafless tree is a dead tree, it used to be,
but never has leaflessness been more
seductive, more lush
with color than now, and never
have bees tried to twitter like birds
with such abandon
Your seasoned summer mind
has been springed
and your thirst for watercolor rains
and eager mornings
made insatiable
forever
And as you breathe
your nascent blooms
are slowly
and surely falling into the old prose of leaves,
into the scorching weight of the sun,
as night is left gasping
long-forgotten prayers
for the vanishing scents
of magnolias
and unexplored skin
morphing into the 'barrenness' of the familiar
green earth,
your newfound life fading as quickly as spring fades
and the greens grow greener.
How many springs can a tropical mind take?
And how many summers?