Short-Lived Hospitality The well-appointed crypt spared no room for spirit to roam, so the buried could play their elegant back and forth of residence and absence. Perfume vials, Mugwort and Rosemary unguents, trinkets, familiars sticky with emotional residues, are still much enjoyed in the long shadow of centuries. A pious gush of maggots erased their struggles and regrets, and all their praying through life’s ferocities. A carved arch reverently frames an opening as if the one supine there needed air, showering sequins on her from the wide desert sky. Millenniums have reordered her space. A different comfort neatly folds silence like organdy in silk paper, diffuses light with crystal bombast. For just a while the tomb carries the visitor over a stream of skulls, the callow rift of time until a ceiling fresco gives a taste of paradise. Envious of the dead, unneeded, he is forced to depart.
Anaho Forever will it be mid-morning in Anaho Bay. No moonlight, storm or sunset will inflict their vengeful melancholy on us. Mid-morning displays a surveyor’s accurate arc and a sequence of turquoise, gold and green, row by row as in a rainbow. Vast and uniform father, the sky plays only a distant role. Anaho, whiz illustrator to all south sea tales, obliterates the torrid bug-bitten brush I came through. A thousand emblems diffuse their variations on love. I must remain still, like a pontiff deep in prayer or I’ll shatter in as many shards. Silence plays the music of palpitation, undulation. Shallow sea trespasses on the sand with an amphibian’s hunch for another way of life. Casuarina and palm lean toward water with castaway thirst. A man washes his horse in the bay, showing muscle, though he never self-reflects as I do. I will not call out, he will not wave, the horse will stand beside him, the breeze always mollifying, the sea hardly rippling. The three of us repeat ourselves, eternalize the instant, keep each other from interruption. Only the fringing reef battles its way towards the indigo opening of the enfolding bay.
Night Fauna In my sleep of jungle, steppe and sea comes a favorite bestiary. Darkness draws a leopard flung across a branch, sleek with the slumber of ages, pinning his markings on the sky. I lay under the tent of his pelt hearing his echoed raucous rumbles. Eyes half closed in the rhythmic clench and stretch of the tiger’s paws, snow mittens, petals of fire, fragrant with creamy marrow. None can fight this limpid splendor so I nestle close to his weapons. Otter rockets through streams of acumen, absorbs lightening in the hair of her wired coat. Nimble otter, how far shall we drift? Horse drums a canter, exalting speed, infinite dactylography. Impetuously writes out the algorithm of his odyssey. At last, a great god confides in me.
Nights of Raivavae They chant nights into perpetuity war-like or tender orchestrations funneled into a capella Odysseys and improvising skies taught them to sing so in absolutes to foil the lacerating departures and for alakazams of return Bequeathed open sea they surf like-minded along the fretwork of bastion waves on star-woven winds The reef fires pelagic cylinders sparks yards of pyretic hair in the night’s amnion Flames chip at monolithic features Outsider appended to the rituals by childish infatuation Siblings strap to my neck to the pontoon of my legs Smell of whelps on my skin from a spell of possession I sift tales from coral sand brother sister spiraling into shells How we succumb to each other the euphonious islanders and I in a contract unsigned They situate me in intervals between peak and cloud cultivate me to favor their broad-leaf crops Pride churns between us invents new tribalisms Nothing beats the moon’s sweeping through the trees and the bacterial lucency in the lagoon’s sapphire eye The heart of Raivavae night defeats all calamity
November, Four PM Autumn tattoos a duck’s eye. The forest floor chisels out a jewel. Yellow ore runs underfoot. Memory and foresight are shuffled. Madness makes overtures to the brain. Thrown by a nuclear deity, a gold disk shines across evening’s first yawn. A falling leaf mummifies in mid-air, crackles before sleep, bottled in acrid coma. Instantly rebirth writes out its green label. In my head throbs bark’s pulse. High and low, the spokes of cycle spin towards remedy. And though the essence of all this still eludes the prowling senses, though lucidness fails to understand, and the reader of this will not cry out: ” That’s it!”, four pm’s perfusion of gold vamps up my blood and softens the riddle.
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Photography Credit: Jason Rice
Stephanie V Sears is a French and American ethnologist (Doctorate EHESS, Paris 1993), free-lance journalist, essayist and poet whose poetry recently appeared in The Deronda Review, The Comstock Review, The Mystic Blue Review, The Big Windows Review, Indefinite Space, The Plum Tree Tavern, Literary Yard, Clementine Unbound, Anti Heroine Chic, DASH, The Dawn Treader, Dodging the Rain, Amethyst Review, The Non-Conformist Magazine, SORTES, Short-listed in 2009 for a Pushcart Prize. Her first book of poetry: ‘The Strange Travels of Svinhilde Wilson’ was published by Adelaide Book in 2020.
