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CBC LITERARY AWARDS

Second Prize
Poetry

AMAZONIA   (p. 2 of 3)

1   |   2   |   3   |   AUG '04

I like to watch the jibóia take the sun
in the Emilio Goeldi Museum.
They have tree branches for props,
a little grass, some dirt-brown murky water.
They don’t do much. They are draped across each other
like much-chewed cigars; they never exercise.

Their stippled skin is an amazing thing: it glides
and sizzles under the bone-white glare of noon,
and the school children tire of it easily, but I don’t.

I would wish for such skin, such muscle
so much careless grace.

I would see my old selves sloughed off as painlessly–
good-bye to the sweet girl at two in blue sundress
and little blue shoes, so long
to the furious teenager who refused to rise
to this or any occasion.

Even now the tiny chapel of the original Presidio São José
built, some say, on the blood and crushed skulls of
the first prisoners,
smells of damp and old prayers
but the immense glass wall makes a frame
we look in on and go on looking in on,
the paper cross high up on the far wall
wavering in the slightest current.

The dreaded, cramped solitary cell is exactly as it was in the 1800’s–
the curious can enter and leave at will,
but when I stepped inside

beneath the new fountain of white quartz,
fracturing water and light,
singing tunelessly, tirelessly all to itself,
beneath the fountain in the courtyard
I could hear the old stones weeping.

I sit in the park near the Governor’s House, one leg
crossed over the other, my rectangular glasses,
book in hand, in perfect imitation
of the sculpture of Rui Barata, the poet.

Side-by-side we contemplate the rouged lips of the orchids,
glossy in the jambeiro trees, and the sky’s
deep blue bodice with its embroidery of pearl-white clouds,
and I remember
a few days ago at the gold-mining camp in Palito
when Robert’s crew came off shift at 6:00 AM
and saw a black onça sitting in the red dust of the road
looking them up and down,

and how, later, pacing across the top of the great earth dam
I wondered what large thing
might be looking me up and down
among the felted leaves and the singular
sun-bleached blossoms: cream,
then yellow, then cream again…

Mid-afternoon in Santarém
the equatorial blue sky has come to rest
on the twin towers of the Igreja Matriz; and now
their upturned faces have seen enough
so they close, gently but with a slight twist,
like blue morning glories
after the ecstasy of morning has passed.

Beyond them, the Tapajós slips its moorings,
casts off the shoreline, gives itself up
to the east-bound current. I too, give myself up,
but it’s not this current,
not this river…
                                         continued...

1 | 2 | 3 | AUG '04