DOÑA FLORA'S HOTHOUSE

The Sargasso Sea in cyclone
season, a flotilla of blessèd corpses
drifting in equatorial currents,
their shaved heads crowned with laurel
to repel lightning, sargassum fronds
swathing both neck and limb.

Tiny crabs burrow ears
oozing cerumen, pipefish slither
into sutured wounds that coffer
bones of African St. Barbara.

In the tropics the blessèd are incorruptible,
whether Goa, Malabo, or Hispaniola.
Landfall at Doña Flora's island
(longitude of Gonave and Barbuda),
green thumb hermit who cultivates

their bodies in a hothouse by the sea.
Shared parts fructify in African soil
from Ile-Ife, guano of Canà-canà,
vulture that flies to heaven carrying
missives, prayer beads and pits.

Swinging her calabash censer,
Doña Flora fumigates with sarsaparilla
entrails of tamarind, soursop kidneys,
banana toes; a zunzuncito hummingbird
flies out her ear to sip balsam tears.

Suspended amid laelia orchids
mulatto cherubs trumpet sones
from Oriente, Doña Flora rattles
her maraca to sprinkle aguardiente
on guava bladders, uteri of red
papaya, mango hearts. By white

mangroves a shanty of lignum vitae,
dried thatching, barnacled crosses.
All Soul's Day and Doña Flora enters
with her animals, laying overripe fruits

on whitest linen. Iguanas chew
sweet-acid tamarind, a jutía rat
nibbles guava, Caná-caná rips papaya--
seeds bursting out--as Doña Flora skins

a mango, bruised with machete,
lifts the bleeding fruit to bands
of amber light, sweet flesh dissolving
in her mouth, its bare stone returned to sea.
 
 

--published in the Indiana Review, vol. 19 no. 1 (in slightly different form)

FISH HANDS

The fisher's son, an acolyte,
sleeps cuddled up in his canoe
of mist, rocking like censer
or bell buoy. Child of the sea,
river, lagoon--Antillean querubîn,
who drools rose water on the pillow,
commands dolphin and barracuda
to weave arabesques of crown, cross, and pike,
boats skimming with sails of flogged skin.
Inside a pelican's pouch he flies from island
to island, wreathing with rain-lilies
light houses, masts, and campanili.

In their shack of tamarind wood,
a chapel on stilts, the smoke of candles
vivifies fish heads (nailed to the wall)
to bleed, quiver, turn east at cock-crowing;
a procession of ants will then surrender
to the flames. Lye falls
from clouds of ash. Lenten night:
the resurrection ferns will again be lush

and green. Yesterday the sea was vinegary,
less brackish than customary for baptisim.
Waves release rosaries gnarled
with bladder wrack that village youths
unravel to mourn another acolyte.
Fragrant as sweet plantain, three mulattas--
fishnet menders--sing a dirge in Yoruba,
pantomime the hammerhead's thrust
and thrash to sign the boy's martyrdom.

Yemayá, Lady of the Sea, spawned
without sin, light from darkest water,
spare the fisher's son, swaddle him with fish
guts, brood him under your manta wings.
That blinding aureole will forever
burn above your shark's-jaw crown.
 

--published in the Indiana Review vol. 19 no. 1

ALCHEMY AND VINEGAR

Blood is toxic
even as wine transmuted,
magic of ichthyology
which also creates
the Aquarian trinity

of fishmonger, fisher, and fish--
or, literally, priest, saint and Christ,
though these three persons
are alchemically indistinguishable.

Fusion point
of the Eucharist, when wine
molecules transubstantiate,
other imaginings become substantial:
roe rosaries, hosts of gill,
cod-liver unction, etc.

Blood is toxic.
Fishmongers wear latex
gloves, goggles, rubber chasubles
stenciled with skeletal eels;
oolite altars are scoured
with gastric acid, chlorinated saints' ashes.

Wine is poison,
St. Hieronymus said, until it ferments
to pure vinegar. By grace

the body's a cask whose uric
distillate or lotium, San Isidoro wrote,
cleanses stained vestments.

Christ, King of Jews,
your wounds gush amber
urine that washes our bodies
more so than water
on the banks of dry Jordan.

--Orlando Richardo Menes