about the naturalness of working a full day,
donning the apparel of a civilized man,
dropping the white man's burden.
Disgust filled me with my former Rousseauian yearnings.
With trepidation, one's dreams
can erect barriers more effective
than the most ill-sponsored illusions.
10, 11

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THE BAY OF CORTES

The sea is a requisitioned article in my possession.
Above, in fat circles of conformity, glide
turkey vultures, their combs
a rich obscenely red.

The guano rocks are isles and stepping stones
of bird waste.
They lie thick and bedeviled with fish fur,
a dull lavender cached hard to the sun
seems to shine a metallic harvest white
as desert rocklets scattered to the breeze.

A speck of a fisherman dots the horizon.
His craft a barque in loneliness across the sea.
Dolphins inveigh the richness of the depths,
persuade latitudes to drift about their wake.
Pelicans sour the parabola distances between light and sound,
become chancy over this distant breath of song.

Above the cliffs and the inner roads that follow
the desert into geometric squares, stand abodes.
The thin supremacy of shadows at dusk disparage the
traveller here.
Burros strayed lie dead by the highway's edge.
The liquid depth of the mountains reinforces vulnerability.
The night air is alive with the torment of insects, asplash
with sound.
Lights carry an eerie message dotted about the hills.
Feeling alone is a delicacy to be savoured by the standards
of the tropic sun.
12

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ORACABESSA

An iron wrought gate of turpentine force conveys little pigment,
almost black parchment letters mindful of
hands, arched and stroked from the very stone, until an
elephantine water runs nettle sand to their granite perch.
The broiling heat in this part of the Indies one knows must,
posthaste, carry to the humus and flies any modicum of
human remains.
And, over distant dispatch of time, the elongated sprawl of waves dashing up straight to the shallow's grave, makes
memory drawn, any record of the little parish's dead flimsy
in the topsy context of soil and undulant peat.

A greened isle stares past the feckless scene, past again an
aged church noticeboard that scrapes out traces of news
worthy of import to the wormy road.