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Ill say a few words about a poem called, Understory. This one emerged
from the tangle of sounds and images I discovered in Costa Rica's rain
forests. Creatures and plants with adaptive camouflage caught me, repeatedly,
off guard. Mislead by my eyes and ears, I took concealment and trickery as
part of the literal and metaphorical landscape. In music, a "deceptive cadence"
surprises listeners by refusing to resolve a musical phrase as expected. The
two words, "deceptive cadence" evoked my experience (of the rain forest and
of human failure) and led me to couplets.
Something to consider: Where and when did you feel most like a stranger and
what concrete images of that experience come to mind?
Understory
I woke to howler monkeys screaming at dawn. The false-eyed iguana changed from orange
to green.
In the raftered lobby, a teal-winged macaw screeched hello baby and the Jesus
lizard ran across the infinity pool that met the sky. The deceptive cadence
of Bachs Passacaglia and Fugue in C minor rang in the forest that made its own clouds
and thus continually wept. Del Monte pineapples flanked the road to Tortuguero
where the forbidden Caribbean sparkled with sharks. In the mangrove, fallen trees
turned
into caymen and leaves doubled in size every day
above a chevroned tiger-heron wading in the slough.
I beached the kayak below tiered and pedestaled trees festooned in droplets, trees studded
with pink
epiphytes, their holdfasts strong as barbed wire.
After a brief sortie with bullet ants and poison
frogs, I regrouped at the thatched tiki bar and added a grey-headed kite to my life
list beneath boa constrictor and sloth. Seven years together, now we no longer speak.
The rainforest absorbs decay in a lyric. Like a bird in a mist net, the half-life of
betrayal.