The Zygomatic Process of the Temporal Bone
In spite of our doubts, spring will happen again
and plans for afternoon tennis.
Oh, but you’re
in the throes of what is hopefully a cold; I, too,
am convalescing just now, after the stunningly
bad pull-apart quesadilla that haunted my guts,
like fast food except it took an age.
You bought
us one each just before the concert dedicated
to “the birth of soul” and romantically lighted;
the candles, though they flickered convincingly,
were battery-powered and the singer a fraud,
him and his band—the bingo night equivalent
of live music, I called it, and yet Otis Redding’s
posthumous chart-topper stays in my inner ear,
particularly his lovesick whistling.
Took our way
through the Hasidic neighborhoods that night,
me listening to your commentary on the Crown
Heights riots of the ’90s and Germanic origins
of Yiddish, while I noticed how mature the girls
looked in their coats, chatting in hushed pairs
at every corner like heiresses, but how teenage
the boys invariably are in their ill-fitting jackets,
worried as clerks, stumbling toward the rituals
their fathers learned in fedoras of the old style.
ODE TO BOULDERING
JUMPERS
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky —W. H. Auden
Nibbling bread, attempting to eavesdrop on tourists in a dive bar that’s internet-famous for being hard to find as Narnia, at Tejo I pitted olives with my teeth, gopherish, sexually vague in tight, expensive denim. Into my khaki lap, like a fireman’s trampoline, I catch dry Icaruses of leaves. I sleep late, trapped in flattering dreams, ignore my German flatmates and cook oats, then go north for a garden and bit of unplanned lunch . In the Japanese tunnel one finds Instagram handles and the uppercase of lovers’ initials carved vertically into stalks of bamboo; scarred characters, meaningless for any but their spur-of-the-moment interpreters. I brush an upside-down ladybug from my hairy knee and apply lip balm. Public art hides in the low weeds— an oxidized orb of bronze meant to resemble a seed but elephantine and sea-green from the cancerous air. Children kick a ball one of the adults inflated across this concrete amphitheater. Nobody watches for long.
[Garden of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation]
A CAROUSEL AT THE END OF THE WORLD
Cafes host salons for the moneyed, who show up in mustard- yellow polos and overly cologned to discuss the forgettable, and long malls of novelty shops advertise the worst joke shirts
about roosters. Champing thick cigars, that fragrant, age-old accessory of masculinity taking its ease, guys and their wives lap the sidewalk at all hours and late into the evening will pin
graffitied dollars to the beams or lintel of a popular bar. At less busy intersections a banyan tree wrestles—almost a Laocoön of cellulose—beneath the strangling tendrils of parasitic fig.
According to a memorial plaque, carousel horses were sculpted from the denser, sun-resistant Gumbo Limbo before a painter brushed on the layers of stirrups and bridle, for added realism.
Yanked down in papery red strips, the Gumbo Limbo’s bark is said to match the quintessential tourist inadvertently burnt during their stay. In this southernmost of keys, the patriarchs
sport either tribal tattoos or pink shorts; both rent golf carts by the half day. Around they go, shuffling after the sax players of happy hour, catching sunset like it’s some fairground prize.
Those roosters, which were brought over from Cuba, strutting beautiful plumage—the lilting tail feathers the color of metal subjected to electrolysis—are too large a symbol; instead, you
and I regard their loud, flightless antics with benign interest . . .
Scratching into the dirt, a miniature Archimedes of the tropics.
Erick Verran’s writing is forthcoming in The Cortland Review, Subtropics, the Journal of Gaming and Virtual Worlds, and the Georgia Review. He lives in New York.