Guyana

--a local bourgeois in the bar in the Forte Crest Hotel,
Georgetown, July, 1994

"What poverty drove a thousand of your countrymen
to die for one faceless man, our here on the edge
of our northern savannah? Your Shakespeare would have
seen in it a play at the end of the world, a monstrous
rapture, a mad coup d'etat, the people buying into
their own demise. (Forgive me, I'm in marketing.)
We fancy ourselves an Eden, yes, but with eels
big as your leg, and some electrocute you as they chew.
Piranha, boas, manta and malaria, mud-black alligators--
perhaps Jones did well to come here, where Eden is
around you but dangerous, where what they disavowed
works exclusively: Al-Can and Reynolds, diamonds and gold,
the Demarara sugar, and the bartender's friend the coconut.
The tall white houses were glorious in my lifetime."

"The city was originally elegant as terror could make it.
The Holy Book of Job had not so many teeth-fish
as the traders' politics. To be sure, our Jesus
was not yours, under our ragged and eaten moon,
though He is the one you made us memorize.
God bless the darkness, yours, for starters,
where salvation in His Name hung strings of lights
and called it downtown. And our own, where love is
a possibility. Fabians to the bosses, we go Calypso after work,
and we have learned to curse only the light of interrogation.
A little after mid-day all the town's surfaces turn reddish tin
and pastels, the shutters discreet against public light
that perfects an otherwise abandoned word. Our land
was not worth your trouble more than to test a theory."

"You don't like what you see, change the camera's lens.
There is always a perfect distance. Your Guyana came and went;
ours endures. Yes, those are same as your white egrets soaring up
from the dump, and yes, we are Anglicans, or nothing worse.
The world's largest church entirely of timbers is here,
(No problem, the whole world is praying for our trees now.)
also the farthest free fall of water, out in the interior.
We were slaves and indentured servants, or just folks waiting
to be discovered, but the bitterest root of all has been
to be be the dark brothers of Jesus in you salvation.
Jonestown saw their Saviour a mandarin and their world ended.
And what fanatic lover does not know the cannibal, my friend.
How shoud Adam separate Eve, his own mind, and his territory?
What truth lasts long taken between tongue and teeth?"

First published in "Gulfcoast"