Literary Imagination, Volume 20, Issue 1, March 2018, Pages 54–55.
HURRICANE-PROOF
That rasp—the ceiling fan?
Or rats? At night rats climb the palms,
the manager said. Don’t sleep
with the doors to the balcony open. Besides,
sea wind’s salt; everything metal
it rusts. She rapped the glass—
Paloma-proof! … The AC whooshes on.
In your mind’s eye Paloma’s heap,
twisted siding, splintered boards,
ragged sheetrock, glass-toothed muntins—fix
though you would that eye
on birds (blue sky, white loops of flight),
white baton tails
and narrow blades of black-tipped wings
and orange beaks (strain though you do
to train your ear on their reedy chirps),
beside the limestone bluff whose seams
they jet into and nest within—
that season’s rental
bulldozed off, the concrete slab
scraped clean … Or hold in view
(the AC cycling off, that rasp!),
the morning’s yellow-crowned night heron
toeing on yellow marsh-reed legs
the lip of the pool and piercingly
eying—there, it stabs, beaks up,
with that black beak which spears
the crabs that cloister themselves
in a salvage of shells
from the locals’ harvest of sea snails,
a gurgling throatful of water—
red hermits amassing at sundown
under the fronds where you, the two of you …
It was as though the sunset,
while it impassioned you and this other
snoring beside you, whose sleep is
hurricane-proof,
hemorrhaged claws, a tide
that armored itself in spiral shells
for its incursion inland.