Beyond the skeletal blades of coconut palms
That click together like Venetian blinds
And twist in the trade winds like feather pens,
Are moving peaks of crystalline green,
The oily, mad-with-life sheen of mermaids
Swelling like bouncing skirts
That tumble in like percolating soap suds,
Stretching like cellophane to a flounce
That sloughs onto beaches
Of instant coffee, raw sugar, cream of wheat.
The world is full of imaginative TV weatherpeople,
But especially here, in Fedora Lampur
Where subject and predicate dangle
In the paralytic continuous,
Under the tropical cloud of the Tourist Uncertainty Principle
That lurks whenever the island's evil secret is covered up
With another outward gesture
To the always dying
And always generating
Heap of choking green.
A prim, tiny lady, holding clippers and a mister,
Is swallowed whole in a miasma of red and purple blooms,
But snips at the fabric, sure of her complete control,
The leaves weighed down by sadness,
The pods still unexploded.
The cool winds make a mockery
Of ambiguity and contradiction.
Hollow morning smiles are exchanged
From loathing servants to the fresh-washed
Gatsby's in sandals walking
Aimlessly in the heat;
The white hotel manager chews out our black waitress
For our benefit how it was inexcusable not to serve
Apple juice with breakfast;
Then it was back to the hotel room, with barbiturate
Sesame Street going out, the great American liberal dream,
Where blacks and puppets live together in creative freedom;
Then rum that left me cringing and clawing in confused
Euphorias stumbling onto the moonlight-dappled beach,
Feeling totally dependent, just like the moment
I arrived,
And touched the island's veil
And bloodied myself with the strangeness,
The interdependence, the forced hybridization
Of the colors of all the nations together
Yet remaining unaware of all
But some provincial perfection —
A wave slightly larger than the others
Could signal the destruction of the island,
But you can't feel the pain splash on you, still they are
Ready to console you with rum, while the steel pan
Drum is out of tune, but that's part of the charm
Of this tossed-off, haphazard, happy place,
This paradise of the impoverished.
Welcome to the tropics,
The only heaven we can conceive of,
The only one we have seen.
Its aloneness contradicts your own — they are together
And you wish to be among them
Who don't hear the dull clang of the bells
Of your city calling you home.
