How the Days Go in the Tropics
At the Last-Stop-Before-Land Bar, the boy dives
for the tourists, they throw in coins, he fetches
them from the sandy bottom of the sea, eyes
cut through the opaline water, his skin is a map
of peeling skin, some lost language of ache
and abandonment, just when he’s come up,
another coin gets tossed in, and his days relay
into each other, and sometimes to give them
a good scare, he stays down for what seems
like an eternity, his lungs tight as fists in his chest,
he counts and counts, and looks up through
so much water at the sky, a broken mirror
that promises rain, only when it rains does he
rest on a hammock in the back of the bar,
where the fish carcasses pile and the feral cats
fight for the scraps, and here he dreams of steady
hard-pressed land where everything is steady,
when the wind blows without any trace of salt,
where the bird song flutters in the foliage
of the trees, and insects form halos in the light
of candles, not enough time to miss his role
as a go between the bottom and the surface of longing.
Page(s) 23
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