I
In matters of island property, like carving the mountain
view, there are palpitating issues, you could say ̶ downed
tree lives and dress rehearsing wives not withstanding.
Your chance for happiness? so far the data's inconclusive.
After the Everest summit shiver ̶ alone at the top, peasant
ant hills below ̶ you get used to uncommon breath,
cloud loitering, sunrise room service. You could count
the air arrival miles you racked up and there's ample time
to declutter the sledge hauled bags of hunger years.
New technology approaching the villas gets turned back
by villagers with machetes who can spot grass snaking
pump lines stretched away. Their gods must be appeased. They
want jobs ̶ like Security Sensor? for blocking intruders
on our Heritage grounds? Keeper of the seals.
On print outs your body throws up shell casings and numbers
to baffle any beach reader of sea leaves. Goodness knows,
the organs try but can't up lift much more "as per". Lung
pipes get sucked blood crimping your face glow and unless
there's a tennis court so little is required of the heart.
Guts you have.
II
For credit checks, Sunday morning's best. Womb worn
women in church shinery get to step the verge. There's ripe
fruit and reason to smile.
Pray for no rain storm ̶ all
that top water racket tearing down like indicators of unruly
market shares.
Best advice: build a Jericho wall. Some sweat marked taxi
men get it in their heads to organise the tourist drive by:
Who lives there, mobiles snap?
In time you learn to trust
only the deference of grass to lawn presidents, the terrier
teeth of smiling coconut peelers.
Out on the terrace, at sunset, you could chill with a stone
ground law maker; pour Scotch movie gangster style
as flowered village girls come up to the iron
gate ̶̶ Dog alert! ̶ belle eyes ringing, Need a handy
lady, guava sweet beak?
Dragon fly blades slash
any hope of sighting sky cranes on coast lines over seas.
One day the gaze will show you the door. Ledgers bow.
Yes, I should go now. Cliché cliché.
– W.W.
A STRAY
wisp of cloud
drifted
up from behind a mountain, crumbled
and dissolved. Was I the only witness
of its determined self-erasing course?
The mountain sighs: Of course not;
nor was it an omen of only your
death: ask that crow in flight
and he will tell you: We are all
drifting in and out of being:
ask that mountain ever reaching
for the nudity by which it keeps redefining its focus
of nakedness, while we, bird and cloud
and man, by contrast of our faster fading,
lend it an illusion of fixity, feed
its dream of timeless solidness whose value
as eternal witness of our cloudiness we invent.
(from "The Gift Of Screws" by Brian Chan)
FARJOURNEY CARIBBEAN 