Return to My Native Sea

    I wrote this poem upon returning from a trip to Rio de Janeiro, where I was born.

 

I went home, although they say you can’t

Tore off my clothes

Took that exhilarating blind and bare bummed slide

But in reverse, to a place encircled in a salt sea

To the hot liquid dwelling place of all paradisal dreams

 

Or perhaps it simply seemed that way

 

A garden herbaceous and delicious

Full of oily flesh in the shape of longing

Embraced in full swelling hills

And the seething, crystalline kiss of Guanabara Bay

 

Sete crescentes de lua, a poet better than I

Called that shape of shorn memory

And I saw those seven crescent moons

Or maybe it was eight, even numbers

Seem to surround this climate

Like the legs of dancers, or the lips of wise young women

Even and round, like the imprint left in the sand

By one pondering the sun

Then dashing suddenly, diving into the ecstatic foam

Exploding into the pounding waves

To be poured, finally, onto the soft and steaming sand