A Shadow in Yucatan Read Online Free Page B

their
tongues...

    I should sit all day
with a fly whisk under a banana leaf, is it so hot!
Like a native of the South Seas, all beads and belly comfortable,
with the sweat running into a rag.
Why do we whites make such trouble for ourselves?
    The day yawns
its intention to sleep.
    The gate-latch
chirps like an irritated cricket.
    Who is this, abroad
before the morning is decent, before it has taken out the
curl-papers and pared its nails?
Is that the tenant, so help me?
The girl who left a letter of no meaning wrapped around the
rent?
And I believing she was dependable...
Footsore...you can’t fool me, stepping careful of blisters...
    Arthritic
fingers fill the kettle.
The unswerving eye escapes the sockets of prejudice, and annotates
with sympathy
    The younger generation
have we betrayed, solitude too much, too soon
The answers we had, but did we first ask the questions?
    ‘ And nu? To pull the
sheet over your head I’m sure, but first coffee, and you eat a
little something...’
    ‘ Mrs. Martins I’m
sorry…’
    ‘ Sorry you should
be, but later. Come. Come inside and sit down...if that cat should
be so kind...a stool for the feet...the dirt never mind...some
things are easy...’
    Stephanie sinks
into new observance, unclouded by timidity, or the over-ready
answer.
An old woman dwells in dreams, and pokes the coals of neglected
opportunity, without guile or expectation.
Her heart too huge to handle, threatens to boil.
She covers it with chatter.
    ‘ The grocer now is
selling up...with the extra penny every time, should I be
surprised?
Oi veh, but the coffee was, for celebration, a quarter off...but
still fresh, you will taste.’
    She strains,
pours and slides it across, sets bagels on a plate, aslant with
knife and napkin...
    ‘ So eat’
    The
interrogation lies folded in elbows and the minute pursuit of
crumb.
It can wait.
Solicitude must first be fed, and is replete with the wiping of the
mouth.
    ‘ Better
huh?’
    'Much. Thank you.’
    ‘ For thanks you can
tell me where you’ve been?’
    ‘ I went to New
York’
    ‘ To see your mama?
Why didn’t you say?’
    ‘ I didn’t go
home.’
    ‘ That is serious, to
New York and not home? Miriam you are no fool, for a week something
wrong.
For what good reason is a person going quietly to New
York?’
    ‘ I went for an
abortion.’
    Apprehension
finds no nest in this hospice of candour, where slanting sun
embraces womanhood
    ‘ Now she tells me!
Afterwards she tells me! Alone, living in my house, she gets an
abortion without telling me!’
    ‘ I didn’t go through
with it.’
    ‘ So, with my own
ears I must have surprises! A pregnant woman sits and eats bagels
and feels perhaps, a little sick. She drinks coffee with a
refrigerator full of milk...She says nothing...Still she says
nothing. Blood from stones, would you believe. So what are we going
to do?’
    The morning has
moved apace to deliver premature.
Reminiscence trembles in the afterbirth of day, and prophecy
foreshadows dark.
There is instantly all and endless time for the old woman, the
young, and the obliging idiot clock.
    Speech must now
grow from silence, and the stones that cockle the black backs of
women in prehistory, left alone with the consequence of men.
    There will
always be light on the sea;
rocks to serve for washboards, and make wrecks.
Children to hide and seek through lives...
Women remain, to spin the flax of deep unquestioning.
    ‘What are we
going to do’ was never a question, but the birth of a
design...
To fashion a key pattern, blood must serve for dye.
    Two women bask
in silence,
absorb the anguish sun.
The cradle of compassion lies in an open palm.

The Wisdom of
Solomon

    My world is swaddled
in bandages, wheeled in a crescent dark boat.
It splints its feet in knitted boots, its fingers shackled in
lace.
Its candid eyes are pin-tucked skies...
but patchwork scars its face.
    Oh for a lifting lung
and the slip-stream escape from the wave!
I would be anything but human.
Have