The middle's where I wonder why as I wake and shake a roach, size of a half-smoked stogie, from my backpack to the jungle. I'm the pale anomaly, new mushroom species, sprouting among the women on the bamboo platform who suckle babies or coil up hair lustrous as hot tar. In knee-high mud socks, they stroll downhill from mired Jeeps to bathe. I follow, slithering. Men heave and haul a dozen trucks up switchbacks gray with elephant-hide mud. All day eating canned Australian cheese or searching for a private place to pee while idle men follow me in the hope men hope about all foreign women, I wonder why. The last truck hauled, the jungle night's quick shutter closes. The Jeep accelerates its shriek up switchbacks, headlights extracting objects from the night - mud ruts, a palm hairnetted with vines looming at cliff edge, snailed fiddleheads of tree ferns embedded in this dinosaur dark, articulate with a wild vocabulary of greens - Nile, absinthe, cucumber, jade, parrot. The Jeep stops to let a truck strung with colored lights like a Las Vegas chorine churn past. Blindfolded by night, my ears are impaled by the shrieking rabble of cicadas, whose eyes are invisible except in imagination, I wonder knowing why. | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...WHEN I WAS A BIRD by KATHERINE MANSFIELD IN THE DAYS OF PRISMATIC COLOR by MARIANNE MOORE GOD by GABRIEL ROMANOVITCH DERZHAVIN A FAREWELL by GEORGE GASCOIGNE MODERN LOVE: 43 by GEORGE MEREDITH CHRISTMAS by CHARLOTTE LOUISE BERTLESEN |