Weather Eye

In summer when the Christmas beetles
filled each day with thin brass shrilling,
heat would wake you, lapping at the sheet,
and drive you up and out into the glare
to find the mulberry’s sweet shade
or watch ants marching underneath the guava tree.

And in the house Mommy would start
the daily ritual, whipping curtains closed,
then shutters latched against the sun
and when you crept in, thirsty, from the garden,
the house would be a cool, dark cave,

an enclave barricaded against light
and carpeted with shadow, still
except the kitchen where the door was open
to nasturtiums flaming at the steps
while on the stove the pressure cooker chugged
in tandem with the steamy day.

The Skinning

I watched my older cousin skin a mole:
it seemed a fearsome thing to do, but I was eager
to be big and full of knowledge, so I stayed there,
brave girl, hunkered down, my flowered skirt
rucked up between my summer knees.
The shed’s stone step — his rough autopsy table —
pressed the morning’s gathered heat into my soles,
the same heat rising through the opened body
of the mole. I frowned against the boomerang
of sun, flung, swerving, off the blade at me,
and in the quiet of the early afternoon — the grown-ups
at their ritual naps — the whispering, skrrt-skrrt,
skin peeling back as if from velvet fruit, rasped
louder than the new, enormous thudding of my heart.

She Comes Swimming

She comes swimming to you, following
da Gama’s wake.  The twisting Nile
won’t take her halfway far enough.

No, don’t imagine sirens — mermaid
beauty is too delicate and quick.
Nor does she have that radiance,

Botticelli’s Venus glow.  No golden
goddess, she’s a southern
selkie-sister, dusky otter-girl

who breasts the cold Benguela, rides
the rough Atlantic swell, its chilly
tides, for leagues and leagues.

Her pelt is salty, soaked.  Worn out,
she floats, a dark Ophelia, thinking
what it feels like just to sink

caressed by seaweed, nibbled by
a school of jewel-plated fish.
But with her chin tipped skyward

she can’t miss the Southern Cross
which now looks newly down on her,
a buttress for the roof of her familiar

Shaken from her Sleep

A girl wakes in the night.  The room
is trembling and at first she thinks
it’s just her anxiousness, a dream,
the heat — her boyfriend’s t-shirt clinging
damply to her skin.  He’s gone,
left on the train, just yesterday,
called up for Basics. (Now, in camp,
he’s polishing his boots and trying
not to cry.) The cloth still smells of him.

She goes out on the balcony
to breathe, to stop the midnight quake,
but finds it waiting for her
in the humid dark.  A coming
storm, steel banks of clouds advancing,
thundering?  But no, the drought’s
not broken yet.  The streets are dry
and she can see Orion’s Belt,
the jewelled sword poised in the sky