ISSUE: Winter 2000
1. Night Arrival in the Tropics
where a thick black looms
in loops and tangles
where the dark
thrusts of palm
pierce deeper dark
of swamp and sky
where air
is an oil and a
humming whispering clicking
springs from mud from wind
from sliding
water and stands around
big and loose-
limbed in the casual
shadows leaning
now then
closer to touch
to stroke
the wildest
skin the
rainiest places
2. Night Cry of the Frogs
who think they’re birds
(though they live,
says the maid,
a terre, pas dans les arbres)
squatting among the tall
grass juices
and shrilling their fierce
intermittent claims—
c’est moi, oui, oui, ici,
moi, oui, ici—then
quickly, tinily
harkening each
to each—toi? oui?—
among the intricate knots
of insect syntax
shrilling, trilling,
declaiming
oui, moi, ici — et toi?—
so stubborn that even
a stranger on this island
knows: if small curled
fallen leaves could
(heaven forbid)
cry out in the night,
they wouldn’t cry like this
3. Night Cow
munching the roadside—
humped and horny,
mournful and O so desolé—
under a buttery grinning
moon, without
a moo of her own, she
wants and wants in
a belly of silence,
wants, white
ghost of a past that had,
said the guide, few “coos,”
a future of silvery
grasslands somewhere
else, instead has to wait
and wade here, night after
night, through prickles
and puddles of darkness, under
a dizzy
umbrella of stars,
devouring patches of weedy
black until her skinny
milk comes
pouring out for
no one at least for
nothing she can name.
4. Night Punch, Night
syrup of crimson, sweet
unassuageable rouge
in the long still
throats of the spinning
dark under
cloud froth—
bloom of black
sugar ripened to
petals of rum to
sniff to
swallow and breathe—
and the sleepers plummet
toward what is
lost and soft,
through snorting through
wallow through deepest
forget—as if there weren’t
right now, clear on the other
side of things
the same old salt-
white light
bleaching the same old naked
sea-bones shrunk
and stranded
on dry white heights.
