Travel Fragments: Costa Rica pts. 1-5

1.

Today’s august-
The human honeycomb seethes.
Aureate tides issue from the crystal sky
And radiate, as they sweep down
The shaggy green backs of verdurous cordillera.
Yet in San Jose, even the icons
Are behind fences and wire.

My homeland has a hand in this, but
I am not of my homeland.
I am as everything under the vault of the sky;
I belong to the terrible expanses.
The land rolls unheeding.
The sea rolls unheeding.
Time rolls unheeding.
The land,
The sea,
Time
Do not recoil before such diminutive monsters
As politics, economies,
Or imagined borders.
They level and make insignificant
The thieving passions of man.
They know a wordless generosity
Whose abundance cannot be diminished
And possess no urge for domination.

They give
Pineapple light, blood orange at sunset,
The roaring voice of the Pacific
The song of unseen wild birds in the morning
The lace work and lances of leaves and limbs
The pelting rain falling in open, warm spaces
On roofs of tin or palm leaf
And the people beneath to bear witness.

I too was born by the sea.
In the remote distances of childhood
I was showered in its diamond mist.
Not so distant, sea and childhood,
Not so distant, you and I,
Only a few strides under the sun.

We cannot separate
The crests and swells of time
From the people over which it cascades
And pulls along in its murky riptide.
And yet you are kind to me.
And yet you lavish me
With your language
With your songs vibrating on strings
With your food that you pull like a miracle from
Your fields and the sea
With overfull hands.

With my hands now
Full of variegated
Fragrant petals,
Allow me to lavish you.

2.

Jaguar patterns
Of dark sand
Toss in the wake
Of the clearest water.

Yellow foam
The color of idle afternoon clouds
Disperses across a field
Of soft granules.

Staid rocks stand in the tide pool
Where they were tossed
Under the eyes of ageless vultures
Who took them to be impenetrable turtle shells.

Among fractured mosaics
A tiny Spartan
Sidesteps the bleached bone
Eggshell fragments.

The little warrior
Has compensated in time
By corporeal diminution
And amplified precision of movement.

Eggshell fragments of time
Are jostled in the ebb
Of incalculable days.

Incalculable days spent
Casting lines in the break
Casting nets in the tenor.

3.

I resurface to bask in midday’s seraphim.
At each ascendant peak
Light touches and flashes a star-point
On the blazing veneer. I am
Following the Nereid alighting
From the distant Aegean
When I dive back into the water’s coils.

A conversation between sun and ocean
Unfolds on my trembling cornea.
The horns of the sea sound.
A conch’s low bellow
Follows my muffled ears
Into twilight sediment.

Floating again,
I feel the fullness of my body displaced.
The language of this reality annunciates itself
On the teeth and tongue of light.
My lips are glazed by salty air.
Something is readying to be spoken.

This moment,
A point of reflection
Stilled and plucked
From the spiraling tide of impressions,
This axis of body and mind and place
Is not to last.

An ominous grey beast adumbrates the mountains.
A tremulous groan shakes the throne of the water.

Golden ages only come from the destruction of an order.

4.

Rain.
Mercury sheets
Shake the window.
Percussive chorus
In the rafters.
Metallic shouts
In the huddled forest.
So similar
To that silver song of the coastline.
The sound of an army in motion.

Indoor objects
Assume a lonely air.
A grey leaf smacks the pane.
Outside
The equestrian smell of fecund earth
Invades the empty spaces.
Low monstrous clouds
From horizon to horizon
Are again announcing
Hurakan’s nomadic lineage.

Amid roots like boas
Streams are surging.
Hoof shaped pools
Glitter in the forest like cat eyes.
The great trees creak
But no double-trilled bird song
Or arrows alight the sky.
All are waiting
Pretending silence,
Murmuring “Earth, earth, earth”...

5.

The sky, a codice,
Unrolls
The figures of hieroglyph
Clouds.
Wanderers
On the deep orange canopy.
The resinous rain has passed.
Tiny crabs with gleaming black shells
And legs the color of coastal wildflowers
Cautiously study the being risen before them.
New fortitude
Is tasted on the tongue
Is painted on the eyes
Breathed into the lungs
Disperses through the blood.

I watch the second by second changes,
The reddening of the sky
The silhouettes moving out across the ocean
The papaya tint the last strip of blue has taken on
And the face of another absorbed in apprehension.

Experience inhabits the body by duality
That of the medium and the spirit.
I ask the other,
“What is beyond beauty?”
He answers,
“St. Peter in Rome”.

Each object of the world
Is readying to release its light and happiness
Is waiting to be struck by the blacksmith’s peen,
And we must exalt each thing.
We must relearn odes,
Raise everything to its proper grandeur,
Contemplate stones until they flash like stars.

Tributes, affirmations, ovations
Must be written
To the organic digestion of a moment of solemn wonder.
Then grandeur may incorporate itself
Into our own germinating perfection.

One more moment
Of sun
Of shoulders and spine
Sloping in contour with the hills.
One more glimpse
Of sandy hair
Stretched along the shore
Winding in the receding tide
One more vision of her curved body
Breasts and belly
To carry with me homeward.

Second Letter (A Petrified Forest).

Dear__,

There are times I wonder, is all that is left for me the indigence and remoteness of my heart? Everything I try to possess falls through my fingers. I shall have to renounce my hands. Each voice fades more quickly than the next. I shall have to renounce my ears. The visions, the foreshadowing of each successive moment, worlds revolving around a world, have all been proven spectral. I will renounce my eyes. In the fatal, internal black mass in which I will sink I will fold my arms around my knees as I descend and revisit the dreams a child dreams before he is born, the dumb dreams of one who knows only depth, murk, and a muted, strangely familiar beating sound.

Dumb and tacit my heart beats, encased in the body born to carry it. It could carry only this one. My mind races and my eyes expand their sight to enfold each thing that confronts me. Always things are projected toward and from, but the center remains still, isolated, a space within space, or a unique object among all that are possible. How distant is the self I knew, the counterpoise that results from balancing all points of degradation and replenishment, of silence and clatter, serenity and chaos. If I am careless with my thoughts I begin to find other people arbitrary, no doubt a result of this peculiar flow of apprehension. I begin to forget that the bodies in motion and the ringing voices simmering on the miasmic surface of reality are in fact relevant to my existence. I indeed forget my own existence entirely sometimes, or I become as sure of my existence as I am of anything else’s, that is, only as sure as it has moved me to reflect. But I reached out to you, and you returned my gesture; you gave me proof that we are alive.

These words are coming at me from strange angles, pursuing me through flashes of light and shade, but like Daphne I am helpless but to let them twine from my fingers. For only in that elusive moment when the untterable seizes form do I find my safety and reassurance. Only by creating that second skin, “another divinity”, encompassing all I am, am I able to solidify myself and take root in the earth. Our words and our letters one day will be unearthed, my friend, a petrified forest.

I am an object contemplated by my surroundings, a chimera of materials and movements, barely holding my memories and knocking the nails back into the framework of my corporality daily. It is torn to pieces by the wind, by the debris in the gale, by the force and teeth and breath of time. Your letters will be a bulwark. I will use them for foundations and walls, harmonic beams in the Doric columns supporting the weight of stone years. I am so far from everyone we knew, in mind and in place, but your carved visage emerges from the white hot stone walls, painted and sneering, with deep, absorbing eyes. Now more appear, caught in the physiognomy of different expressions, wild spatterings of color about the brow and cheeks, hundreds of marble likenesses of all your magnificent poses and profiles, all the angles that one could describe in stone or on canvas, a whole lifetime we lived together in stilled images. How glad I am, that you have returned my words.

For ever returning,