January 19, 2009

Genesis 9

Jolted by the choking bus,
faces and fumes smolder
and stagnate, Spanish warnings
splashed above unreachable rails;
i stand amidst it, my face in
the armpit of your rainbow tee shirt.

Sweating into Turrialba, its ruins,
motels, cockroaches, and creaking beds.
Over volcanic craters a conversation,
over the offer of a taxi-ride from
Humberto, over the fear we had when
he stopped in front of the house and
the wheelchaired man smiled and waved.

In the Costa Rican mountaintops,
amidst smoldering lava and nature's warnings,
an old covenant comforts us above
a whistling waterfall. The forest floor
lined with leaf-cutter ants busying themselves
without worry of providential destruction,

for colors streak through the ashen sky,
though you had tried to steal them,
though your every thought be perverted,
never again will columns of anvil cloud envelop
the whole of earth. Still, as we march through
Mayan wastelands, i beg you to not twist symbol,
to not manipulate mercy and grace

to prove that they don't exist.