A Shadow in Yucatan Read online

  To spy through the heat the spearing fish fowl, drying its wheel-spoke wings.

  The spoonbill imitates the sloth.

  The heron simply blinks.

  Buzzards are doggone dust in the eye, mayhap you’ll brown up a bear...

  The heat is a white welt on the skin, and the silence a sting in the ear.

  'Whew...can you reach me some ice from the bucket?’

  ‘Sure. What you gonna do?’

  ‘I tie it around the back of m’neck...y’git cool...y’also git wet...’

  ‘Y’oughta get air conditioning’

  ‘Try tellin ‘em that in Vermont.’

  T for Tallahassee. If its neither chrome nor concrete,

  it’s hibiscus or a swinging seat.

  Evenings are blister crackers, cambric, cottage cheese.

  ‘D’ya ever stop?’

  ‘Sure...bouta mile. I’ll buy ya a sundae...D’ya like coffee ice-cream?’

  ‘Prefer pistachio...coffee’s ok’

  ‘Pistachio looks like peppermint...it’s a cheat...but y’have what y’want’

  Into blue-ridge County, heat haze moonshine, and the mythical hillbilly boys, all bib-tucker freckle, gawn t’ground in Nashville Tennessee...only the sparse spine mountains, followin like pickpockets, kickin each others heels.

  On the local station, nuthin but down-beat denim, nasal as snot...

  ‘Ah reckon Ah could do as well.’

  ‘Could you take that kinda trouble?’

  ‘Nah. Helps thinkin y’could. Ah’m gonna pull off in a while and git me forty winks’

  ‘I’ll take a walk’

  ‘Watch out fer rattlesnakes...’

  ‘I ain’t planning to get to Nevada’

  ‘They ain’t the kind I meant.’

  Vaulting down from vantage height, she bites the two-bit dust.

  ‘Shoulda warned ya’

  ‘I’m ok’

  ‘Sure y’are’

  Into the scrub forest where the giant shadow falls...

  to raise the bracken battalions with their desiccated bows.

  They release the tent-peg silence with one rising ringing dove...

  An abyss of cool acceptance, unquestioning as sleep, oblivion in peeling bark, shedding the fixed grin...

  Wet root, wet back, burying your face in green

  God is the groin and armpit of tree,

  (A chrysalis revolves on a thread)

  His belly is the sweating earth,

  His breast a nettle leaf.

  Oh Sepulchre! Stone silence

  Maria, comfort me...

  'C’mon let’s git. Five hours should do it.’

  Gethsemane

  ‘Located conveniently in the suburbs’ it said.

  So it is, in this two-eyes-and-a-nose snivelling street, each eye with its twitching lid.

  Special offer for you lady, you and your yap-yap animated pipe cleaner, tarred about the nose and ass...

  Is it only your red-eyed dawg that weeps? Do you knit as we pass by?

  Holy Mary...Mother of God... pray for me now and in the hour...’

  Death? C’mon? Who said anything about death?

  Twenty two, buckle-my-shoe. That mini-brick incinerator ready for count-down?

  That ain’t nuthin but a postal depot for unclaimed mail, sorted and stacked.

  Dachau they thought was a bone-meal plant.

  So it was.

  What do they do with the corpses? Sixteen an hour, eight hours a day, six days a week?

  Holy Mary, midwife, mother, do you hold a murdered baby by its feet?

  ‘Second floor at the top of the stairs’

  Calvary at least would give you time to think, and if it were a sharp-stone path you’d need to watch your feet…

  God, do you care when we thirst? When we twist?

  Doesn’t. Never did. Fuckin doesn’t exist.

  Mary, bleedin Mary knows, but she just sits and weeps...

  When, oh when will someone somewhere speak?’

  ‘That’s right. In here...Now sit y’self down. We’ve all been waiting for the eighth to form the group...’

  Seven febrile spinsters sit and suck their cheeks, extenuate, then elongate, in the bowl of a quivering spoon...

  Shouting into silence, sinking into sibilance, with canny careful grins...

  They are clad in colour

  All colours here are black.

  All movement is mechanical.

  All gestures calculate.

  ‘Come in, sit down, we are expecting thee...’

  The high priest dons his black mass mask, prepares the surgery...

  ‘Say, y’know...I find it kinda close...I’ll jus open the window so we can breathe a bit...’

  The embroidered air hums an octave of sea.

  the notes are single salted, threaten to dissolve...

  benedictus, benedicat, the embedded memory!

  Two feet on a beach with phosphorescent skin,

  immaculate with winking rings on nail, on anklebone...

  The exploding dawn, the hissing surf, the welling wet mud...

  Further off the tip-toe crab that drinks the timely surf, washed back from apprehension, and the terrors of the earth, to float beneath a carapace, and withdraw its periscope.

  The blue bottle water, and all that lovely lace, squandered on the menstrual moon, with her hidden and pouting face.

  If torn, it re-forms.

  If tattered, it refracts.

  When the scurrilous sea abandons it, it furs the collars of the earth...

  ‘Meaning is in Being. Unconscious that you Are.

  Willing is distortion.

  I am neither near, nor far...’

  ‘Oh God! Thank God! I could dance or weep.

  Oh Lord forgive my anger, blessed Jesu, bear with me.’

  'Now honey, never mind. Have a Kleenex...don’t you cry. You’ll be through in half-an-hour...it really doesn’t hurt....Now where’s you goin?’

  ‘Is this the way out?’

  ‘You looking for the powder room? Honey, are you sick?

  ‘No I feel marvellous. I just want the street.’

  ‘You wanna leave? But what about your fee? You came all the way from Florida...’

  ‘It was worth it. I promise. You go on without me.’

  Going Home

  Hawk. High strider.

  For whom do you churn buttermilk, who drinks your cloudless cream?

  What power tilts your balance of wing?

  Would you give no thanks for my shoulder of rest?

  I’d give my right hand for your eye, for your nest,

  for your claw of calamity, a beak-full of blood,

  to spring without falter, to dip without guilt...

  Hawk, sky serpent, will you teach me intent?

  Salmon salut. What penetrates your impervious skin,

  your scales of incision, your pivoting fin?

  Fish, can you listen while you swallow the tide

  convert the sea’s order, placate its demon?

  Stay steady and answer, while you sieve through a gill

  as fine as a feather, the Omnipotent Will.

  What gave you the courage to defy, single handed, the Flood and Creation?

  Salmon leap up and teach me to swim.

  Fawn, frost-bitten, born before spring;

  unprepared for extinction, without scale or wing.

  From the muzzle of your mother, you steam your rough faith that springs a quick skip to the grass’s bent swath..

  Show me the marrow of innocence.

  In the vortex of the waters we shall need the salmon’s skill;

  in pounding confusion, the hawk’s high pennant quill...

  Child, when you set me from your shoulder

  will you teach me how to live?

  The Landlady

  Miriam Martins is eating bagels off the blue chequered cloth that gives a laundered look to the wilting morning.

  It is ten only; already t
he trees flag and hang out their tongues...

  I should sit all day with a fly whisk under a banana leaf, is it so hot!

  Like a native of the South Seas, all beads and belly comfortable, with the sweat running into a rag.

  Why do we whites make such trouble for ourselves?

  The day yawns its intention to sleep.

  The gate-latch chirps like an irritated cricket.

  Who is this, abroad before the morning is decent, before it has taken out the curl-papers and pared its nails?

  Is that the tenant, so help me?

  The girl who left a letter of no meaning wrapped around the rent?

  And I believing she was dependable...

  Footsore...you can’t fool me, stepping careful of blisters...

  Arthritic fingers fill the kettle.

  The unswerving eye escapes the sockets of prejudice, and annotates with sympathy

  The younger generation have we betrayed, solitude too much, too soon

  The answers we had, but did we first ask the questions?

  ‘And nu? To pull the sheet over your head I’m sure, but first coffee, and you eat a little something...’

  ‘Mrs. Martins I’m sorry…’

  ‘Sorry you should be, but later. Come. Come inside and sit down...if that cat should be so kind...a stool for the feet...the dirt never mind...some things are easy...’

  Stephanie sinks into new observance, unclouded by timidity, or the over-ready answer.

  An old woman dwells in dreams, and pokes the coals of neglected opportunity, without guile or expectation.

  Her heart too huge to handle, threatens to boil.

  She covers it with chatter.

  ‘The grocer now is selling up...with the extra penny every time, should I be surprised?

  Oi veh, but the coffee was, for celebration, a quarter off...but still fresh, you will taste.’

  She strains, pours and slides it across, sets bagels on a plate, aslant with knife and napkin...

  ‘So eat’

  The interrogation lies folded in elbows and the minute pursuit of crumb.

  It can wait.

  Solicitude must first be fed, and is replete with the wiping of the mouth.

  ‘Better huh?’

  'Much. Thank you.’

  ‘For thanks you can tell me where you’ve been?’

  ‘I went to New York’

  ‘To see your mama? Why didn’t you say?’

  ‘I didn’t go home.’

  ‘That is serious, to New York and not home? Miriam you are no fool, for a week something wrong.

  For what good reason is a person going quietly to New York?’

  ‘I went for an abortion.’

  Apprehension finds no nest in this hospice of candour, where slanting sun embraces womanhood

  ‘Now she tells me! Afterwards she tells me! Alone, living in my house, she gets an abortion without telling me!’

  ‘I didn’t go through with it.’

  ‘So, with my own ears I must have surprises! A pregnant woman sits and eats bagels and feels perhaps, a little sick. She drinks coffee with a refrigerator full of milk...She says nothing...Still she says nothing. Blood from stones, would you believe. So what are we going to do?’

  The morning has moved apace to deliver premature.

  Reminiscence trembles in the afterbirth of day, and prophecy foreshadows dark.

  There is instantly all and endless time for the old woman, the young, and the obliging idiot clock.

  Speech must now grow from silence, and the stones that cockle the black backs of women in prehistory, left alone with the consequence of men.

  There will always be light on the sea;

  rocks to serve for washboards, and make wrecks.

  Children to hide and seek through lives...

  Women remain, to spin the flax of deep unquestioning.

  ‘What are we going to do’ was never a question, but the birth of a design...

  To fashion a key pattern, blood must serve for dye.

  Two women bask in silence,

  absorb the anguish sun.

  The cradle of compassion lies in an open palm.

  The Wisdom of Solomon

  My world is swaddled in bandages, wheeled in a crescent dark boat.

  It splints its feet in knitted boots, its fingers shackled in lace.

  Its candid eyes are pin-tucked skies...

  but patchwork scars its face.

  Oh for a lifting lung and the slip-stream escape from the wave!

  I would be anything but human.

  Have we wriggled so far to be snared in warm blood featherless, to assume dominion over those that are free?

  Free to succumb in unthinking endeavour

  A nest too slap-happy for wind,

  an unduly severe winter...

  a dearth of flying food.

  Foresight and intelligence!

  Why not beak or claw?

  The well polished horns of conflict

  impale all skidding hope.

  I can choose what has been chosen, confine a bright bold life in a barred cell of circumstance, fed on a selfish breast of fierce and dogged watchfulness.

  A twisted spoon of anguish, to feed skimmed, or curdled milk.

  My love I will set you afloat in a basket of weed

  Commit you in prayer to the eddying sea...

  My life will be brined in well bruised salt

  It will numb the fluent tongue.

  The songs it sings will be fractured strings.

  Its colour sponges of grey.

  But the moon will slice six blades of blood

  first, my darling one.

  The Agency

  Coral Gables denies its origins with emphatic upraised palms.

  Too many flags oblige in its ascent, pay homage to its marshalled loyalty...

  (The State of the Nation here is manifest.)

  The ancestry of mangrove mud is overlaid with lawn.

  The dugong, menaced by machine, is long deceased.

  No gentle jaws plough the navigable channels free...

  Where ocean-going fishing boats now snub the wharf, the sinewed swarthy boy once clothed his hook...laid his baskets, set his snares, and slept.

  Here impeccable shutters are the well turned cuffs on sleeves of houses, suites of rooms, textures in two pleasing tones...

  Wide sweeps of water, incised by steps, lead the harnessed eye.

  No hedges interrupt, or hold the small vulgarities of yours or ours...too trimmed, or not enough...

  ‘This neighbourhood b’longs t’all of us. Elected residents and income keep the nigras out’.

  Women here have too much time to spend entirely.

  Despite the rigours of perpetual war with heat, the car seat cover, and the sweat that lies in ambush for the moment in unplanned transit between the ‘Charity Luncheon’ and the ‘Lonely Wives.’

  Good works and social conscience frost the day that otherwise would be all angel cake

  *****

  Adoption volunteers are all discreet, as befits the empathy of those who ligature the cord, from which the nerves run silver into smiles, and thanks, and letters of content.

  (The wound the new child left remains unstitched. The bleeding staunched with words of cold encouragement.)

  Before the blind and monitored transplant the vessel must be nurtured carefully...

  Tremulous questions answered with restraint...

  the liquid of despair drawn to resolve in the chalice of a healthy pregnancy.

  *****

  ‘A taxi we take. I pay, and I come too...You call and fix it...I fix orange juice’

  Two women extricate from the comfort of the turning wheel...

  Deliberate....

  Conceal misgiving in elaborate concern.

  (The Cuban cabbie rests his anchor arm athwart the brown split back)

  They recount coins, check purses, pull at sleeves...

  (He tips his mirror, wipes his forehead,
sets the meter, and sits back)

  The old one gives a tip with emphasis.

  (He smiles and touches his baseball cap. Restarts the engine, waits, and pulls away to join his colours to the odds-on race)

  The older takes the younger’s arm, and forces a slower pace.

  *****

  One was expected.

  Another chair is fetched, the tapping point of irritation laid aside.

  The sleek combed head shakes free its wasp of doubt, and smiles upon the Negro coffee maid.

  ‘This must be your...? How very nice...How pleased I am to meet you...’

  ‘She’s a friend.’

  ‘Might as well be father for the way I feel...If I am speaking out of turn you put me straight.’

  ‘Her name is Mrs. Martins’

  ‘Miriam will do, and sick at heart to watch this tragedy...lovely mother...lovely girl come here to pledge her unborn child away. I come to say the things she cannot say herself, no shame it is, and no embarrassment...For love she comes to talk. Too old I am, to offer anything...If I had youth, or money...Ah my Gott’

  The old face crumples like a burning shoe, and shakes as though to free itself of scald.

  The girl kneels to take the thorny hand; restore its life against her wet soft cheek...

  Two figures captured in the sculptor’s eye,

  weighted with grave linen-fold to drop the bowed old back on slim arched neck...

  finds unexpected stillness that shouts back.

  Weeping assumes a flawless cast, and every running tear an edifice.

  Three women find themselves conjoined; by wholeness and the single heart.

  Nothing was evaded. Nothing planned. A well was struck. Three women drank.

  Nothing now cannot be said. Little need be, either.

  There is a house in the hills where expectant mothers wait, splitting and sharing the kindling of hope, and rocking their babies to life...

  Curved bellies precede the slow paced day, and announce the imminent hour; paring, cooking, preserving fruit, searching the wide white sky.