The four of us dangle and swing in canoes: Romulus, Remus, Li’l Abner, and The Wizard, floating by green hawthorn, deciduous holly, surrounded by dragonflies known as snake doctors, Anopheles mosquitoes, owl butterflies, woodpecker. The capture is inevitable.
A sanguine septuagenarian, who once entered prizefights, now stoop-shouldered, with quick dark eyes, voice like coarse gravel. In a glass-sided see-in coffin, he holds court.
Looking almost alive, sometimes it is impossible to differentiate works of human beings from acts of gods.
The youngest of seven, a middle-aged high jumper, tall and loosely structured, hair with a curl in the back like a breaking wave, dons mirrored sunglasses, red baseball cap, adorns himself with intimidating habiliments: trinkets, stars, stratified ribbons— inappropriate around civilians and children— betoken his vulnerability, dealing off the top in a state of apprehension, beaten on the head and shoulders. The delta waves wax and wane, artifice required to survive, a work of creation incomplete.
Filtered sunlight and shadows of clouds, torrential rains fall upon this large lump of mountain butter. A breeze puts waves upon the water, coastland sinking out of sight, pressing down on the muck beneath it.
Income and elevation exist on a sliding scale. Unprivileged people hover in the lowlands, privileged abodes rest on higher ground.
Humans, self-conscripted to fight nature, breaking down brush like an elephant, taking what is not given, expecting the gods to surrender, spreading like nuclear winter, closing down life forms. Vegetation cannot decay unless it grows first.
Suspicion, a force to be controlled, a robust poet, attired in alienation, with fervent voice, asserts there’s not a market anymore for poetry, especially romantic— it’s a thing of the past.
Desert Dweller 