rd king DOT net : American Summer

American Summer

Poems written while traveling.
V.I. & B.V.I.


1:  JFK

Dissolving now into the time/place delirium
of airports.  Corporate ingenuity, travelers'
kiosks, haze, the multi-cultural repatriation:
"Please, sir, take me there.  I wish to visit
my mother who will not leave the forest."


2:  Sugar Beach

Palm fronds rustle in the evening's trade wind.
Moored sailboats eddy on the little swells.
A silhouette of unzoned power lines runs
past the beach resort and down this spit
      of utter third worldliness.


3:  Portrait of the Artist as Tourist

I found a wallet in the surf.
I found a turtle shell.  All evening
I played out the matrical combinations
of their elective affinities.  It was haughty,
      ambiguous and dense.


4:  Birdsong

The ceiling fan's propeller silhouette
beneath the skylight—brick veranda
open onto the bay.  The first notion
of light, then someone starts his long solo
of commentary, happenstance and commentary.


5:  Distant Thunder

Spotlights on the palm trunks.  Coconuts.
Trade wind rustling the fronds again—a brief
intrinsic pause.  Same stars.  Same desires
and something else, inarticulate,
      flexing, elusive.


6:  Roadtown

The cock crows in the midday heat.
Standing water stands in the deep gutters
and vacant lots—lizards, chickens,
refuse and blossoms.  Heavy musics
move by the lime green shanties
now coral or yellow with violet roof.


7:  The Night

Night tide drumming on the breakwater.
The ceiling fan with it's quiet heartbeat.
A little time to spend awake
      after a brief, morning rain.


8:  A Day at the Beach

Flesh by the pound—tourist flesh—
sailboat white or coral pink
or honey-tanned and well-fed.  Sultry
pageant of beach play and string bikinis
and plain desire smeared across
      this palm-lined apparition.


9:  Old Slavery Days

Thick black faces.  Thick black songs.
Drumbeats only missionaries hear.
Hard labor and separation and fear
whipped into hatred through the long,
      long misery of sugar.


10:  Same Things

Hiking now through jungle forest.
Tree roots tripping our feet.  Loving
this wind and shade—plain, plain things.
I'm thinking back 100 years, 400 years,
4,000 years:  same thing—wind, shade.




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Poetry

American Summer

V.I. & B.V.I.
