New Light (Aunty Maria's Ashes)
Oscar Wilde: "Memory is the diary that we all carry about with us."
I dreamt today about Aunty Maria,
she was floating ridgid as driftwood
down the Icacos river dam, floating
into those soft evenings of half
darkness where light gathers on the
rim of things as shadows cut shapes
into the blue sky.
I've had this dream before. Once, I
called out to her through the
charming two-tone whistle of the
coqui frog, where the harmonics
connected our voices with an invisible
wire that encompassed the wailing
creatures of the night.
Sometimes I am certain she is happy,
joined in the rhytmn of the rain that drips
inconsistently under the white spill of the
moonlight, beneath the giant ferns,
mountain palms and orchids. And oh the
muddy smell of orchids, life vibrating,
pushing its way out of the damp ground.
Her body has a memory, locked into a daze
of images where starlights penetrate the
clear threads of our conversations as the
heaviness of our words edge into the wilderness.
Their flight a certainty, a prolonged reflex of our
last goodbye. Everything liquid begins to swirl
like deep water, into sleep.
When silence prevails, I taste Plantain, bitter,
unripe, mashed and fried with garlic.There's a
sweet, creamy and zesty undercurrent of rum
in my mouth. Aunty Maria is still with me in that
warm angle of light that holds the anola tree lizard
where the unnamed remains of what it is to love,
dwell.
