Poetry
The Man in the Mangroves Counts to Sleep
To hear the stereo version of the opera, The Man in the Mangroves Counts to Sleep,
go to: http://www.jamminpower.org/MAN.html
The whiskey quart dims the light.
The blue tarp stretches over me
for another infinite night of lying back in headphones
and old paperback crimes.
Between my dozens of cigarette boxes and clear bottles,
and some other dirt bag's and his old lady's,
I'm hidden in a valley of trash.
Would take me only three shopping cart trips
through the parking lot to clean mine out.
But the jumble is familiar as home.
My long-talking and quick-drinking boat friend
who uses the trees as a dinghy dock
(over a year and I don't know his name),
brought by the cleanest girl tonight.
I could tell she was spotless inside and fat-rich out.
Like an angel from my old mathematician days,
when everything fit together.
Straight-backed and poker-faced,
she's skimming this night swamp for what?
She wants to observe through glass,
scratches at the thought of lice,
wants to be this world's stranger.
But sits on the edge of my permanent blanket anyway ‐
what I can extend ‐
and asks me real questions.
Like my name.
I almost forget how to answer in structures.
I call her
Lady.
No woman has had me in years.
In another life, I was a Christmas baby on the Pacific coast.
Grew up to figure on chalkboards and ride formulas to the sky.
Newton, Koeppler knew the secret of angles spreading to curves.
I got close to the Pythagorean magic.
But it was too painful a ride.
For years I wanted to skew the numbers so nothing added up,
like the family's and country's creed.
No accident there. Numbers are forgiving.
Or did my fine shoes walk me out into one choice
after another,
getting muddier, dustier, wafer-thin.
Getting me here.
Day comes and goes quieter under these trees that root
through water to sand, learning how to live without ground.
Now I understand how it makes perfect numerical sense.
Like the music of the spheres.
I've slept on hot highways, under trees in storms,
on icy storefront steps,
north east west south and all permutations of this country
and this mangrove swamp right now
is what it all equals up to.
A warm sure place. A finite place. The only place.
Key West's finest usually shake the bushes on Friday mornings
when we know to disappear.
Got two easy jobs to keep me in bottles and cans.
More money than I can spend. The V.A. for my coughs.
And drinking slow and constant makes my bed soft.
My sharp blue eyes still startle in the morning
when I look in Kenny Roger's men's room mirror
and wash away the mangrove night.
My elliptical face will not relinquish its handsomeness,
even though it's hazed and climbing the lift downward.
Every dusk, I watch the dark descent until I'm part of it.
The black water bordering me matches the sky.
I ride the boat and can't get up no matter who whistles
or calls Hey Buddy or wants to steal my time
for something other than the journey to the place
where it all blanks out.
When I surrender to the numbness of numbers.
Enter the city of denial, where everything's a negative,
and I sleep with small fear of waking in the big mooned night.
Light will you still sum me up?
How far will you go before you're unwilling
to stop me from slipping to the other side of zero?
This poem appears in Donna's book,
Under the Influence of Paradise — Voices of Key West.