Читать книгу Americas: Selected Verse and Vignette - A. Robert Lee - Страница 10

Going Galápagos

i

Three

Quito

sea-lions

stretched

like

Ecuadorean

pashas

along

the

dockside bench.

Equator

gate-keepers

of

Pacific

ease

and

loll.

Whiskered

docents

of

fin, beak, claw and shell

carapace and wing

sea and island

Beagle and Acushnet

sight and word

and

all of them

yawning.

Quito

via

runway Guayaquil.

Quito

of

La Plaza Grande

La Catedral

El Mercado de Otavalo

Quito

of

Hidalgo Gothic

be-hatted mestizaje

a hundred shoeshine boys

Quito

of

thin oxygen

and

Andean volcano hills

Quito

of

Earth’s closeness

to the sun

Quito

of

street pobreza

and

JW Marriott Five-Star Hotel

Avenida Orellana y Avenida Amazonas

ii

Quito to La Mitad del Mundo

actually

250 meters

off centre

Pyramid

of

latitude and longitude

GPS-confirmed Museo Inti-Nan

actually

the centre

of

earth’s

curvature

earth’s

hemispheres

earth’s

lobes

Near, though

iii

Thank you

Incas

everywhere

Thank you

Ecuador’s

mestizos

criollos

quechuas

Chirrera, Jama Coaque, Tolita, Machalilla, Valdivia

Thank you

Lago Titicaca

Manco Capac

Machu Picchu

memory quipus

Merci

Charles Marie de Condamine

rubber, quinine, metrics, circumference

Gracias

Juan Montalvo’s Las Cantilinarias

thoughts, views, language

Gracias

Jorge Icaza Coronel’s Huasipungo

novel, history, memory

iv

Quito zodiac

to cruise ship

isle for isle

turtle-journey

to

Las Galápagos

Islas de Colón

Archipiélago de Colón

Islas de las Galápagos

vertical arrow diving frigates

at home blue-footed boobies

herons on one foot watching

at home huge gulping pelicans

swallow tailed gulls on sentinel duty

Darwin’s finches

(one upon my shoe)

neck coupled albatrosses

un-flighted cormorants among the crabs

sedate breaststroke lagoon turtles

night time spectral prowler sharks

rock-hopping diver penguins

clambering, clod

heroic monument tortoises

iguanas land and marine

in their thermometer bodies

of mottle-leather skin

and

un-dinner table sneezing salt

and amid these origins of species,

across ranger white-marked trails

across silver forests

across black roped lava

across 500-species of shrub and plant

across volcano pools

ascend

rock formations

serrated cliff-faces

weather and wind chiseled ledges

whorls, folds, wrinkles

high cathedral vaults of Nature

playfields of pottered cinder

stilled spurts of fire-stream

messaged pebble, boulder, stone

live thesaurus petrification

vocabularies of Spain fade –

San Cristóbal, Santa Cruz, Baltran, Isabela

and other Encantadas

vocabularies of England fade –

buccaneer Ambrose Cowley

Darwin Research Station

Lonesome George

vocabularies of Melville and Vonnegut fade

page and paragraph

vocabularies of cruise and tour fade

guide and guidebook

is not this, first, finally, un-faded

earth’s evolutionary design

earth’s sea-risen island

epic

of

magma, basalt, crust, littoral?

is not this, first, finally, un-faded

earth’s delivery room?