Quintana Roo

(i)

Driving though blizzards of butter-golden
butterflies. Mile after mile, hour after hour
veils of them ahead, bird-sized, iridescent blues
wings beating in distant applause,
cabbage-whites like pallid English tourists
populous as beach-wraiths.

Car-less roads stretching to tomorrow
straight as honesty, flanked by jungle
black hawks circling overhead.

No farm, no village, no peasant hut
but far ahead a butterfly-crowd
of bright-garbed Mayan Indians
clustered round a car crash
whole families on giant tricycles,
drawn, like the hawks, by death.

(ii)

Chichenitza, palace of panic
home of human sacrifice
a gruelling climb in slavering sun,
sheer edge which drops away
stairs only visible as you lean out
falling, always falling.

Inside the temple of terror,
no cooling labyrinth
but steps again, sweating slime
oozing walls, the exhaled breath
and fear of centuries,
falling, always falling.

(iii)

The serpent beguiles and charms
“See here!” “Try this!”
but the fat woman from Hull says smugly,
“We’ve found our place by the pool.”
Tree of knowledge quite safe from this Eve
apples fermenting on the grass.

They’ll tell their friends
they’ve been to Mexico.

(iv)

The Plough carves a curious furrow
splitting the sky from breast-bone to pubis,
a pan, tip-toe on its handle-end.

The moon has turned her face away
from the glare of Venus, bright
as a floodlight on the horizon.

(v)

Romping with a chuckling toddler
clowning for attention;
singing to a lover
the only one who knows the tune;
reaching out and touching dawn
finding it warm and velvet;
dancing till pinkly breathless
but never want to stop;
waking up and remembering
who you are;
is swimming with dolphins.

(vi)

Barefoot Indian children swarm round the car
at the incongruous jungle speed-bump
try to sell dates for a dollar.

The Yankee woman in the souvenir shop
drawls to her kid, “If there’s anything
you want, I’ll buy it for you.”

(vii)

Palm tree leaves
fingering the sky
playing scales
of light and shade


(viii)

Garlanded with rifles, pistols, holsters,
the soldiers at the road-block lounge,
impassive and deadly as the black hawks overhead,
peer into the car, eye the flawless flesh
of daughters in their shorts and strappy tops.
I wonder wildly if they would take me instead,
think of Boudicca weighing the odds
the grand-children she’d never hold
mutely handing poison to her weeping girls.

(ix)

Mildew rejoices in the fetid air
spreading its dark infectious rash
insidious student-hovel smell
into wardrobes and corners.

Washing fails to dry in this steam bath
but irons are redundant
creases fall from linen within moments
in the damply glistening air.

(x)

Resist the purple undertow
dragging, cajoling, tempting,
steady yourself, loose-limbed
time the onrush and push clear
the suck and hiss of surf
lifted, carried in the white
rush of abandonment.

(xi)

Springy turf, smell of new-cut hay
low sun, now sorry for its burning noon
swallows swooping into the blind windows
of the abandoned bleached-white
Tulum temple complex, cliff-high
above the Caribbean, once a town
as populous as Seville.

Over each door a carving
inverted god, descending
wings folding, born head-first
into this earthly paradise.