TROPICAL TOPIC

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The fan is the centre of my universe.

I ask, Does cold air fall?

I am baking from the feet up.

Amid giant retorts

The God of Heat experiments.

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This weather’s great

If you’re cold-blooded,

Soaking it up. Remember mud?

Mud, glorious mud.

Nothing quite like it for cooling the blood.

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Cooling towers sound so good.

Why can’t we go live in one?

There we could still be active,

Even radioactive.

At least we’d be out of the sun.

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TRISTEZA

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That pensive spell, the sadness that you see

In Gauguin’s women, for instance, sitting quietly,

A faraway look in their eyes, as if deep

In melancholy thought – it’s not:  it’s the heat,

And the way the heat comes back, that brooding gaze,

Abstracted, prompting such words as ‘lointain’,

Yet there is something sad about heat – it wells up at noon,

Prompting you to choose the shaded side of the avenue

And placing a value on sombra rather than sol.

The Romans knew that ghosts appear at midday

In the haze as it wobbles up from the ground,

And as for Brazil it is under that spell

Brewed by the tropics, inducing a trance

Moved by the minor key of the Bossa Nova.  

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MY ENEMY

My enemy avoids the shade.

Not for him your awnings, bowers,

Or, on the street, the sombre side

Trod by the wise at certain hours.

At three, I seek the dazzled bourse,

An Englishman to my last pore.

This villain drains the stream before

My pilgrimage can reach its source.

He paints with hues which sting like hell.

His Myrmidon mosquitoes bite.

And should I bend to check my bill,

Who do you think steals up on me,

Then, like some faithless lover-boy,

Causes me to toss all night?

Take to the cellar, soak up bliss

Through sockless soles. My nemesis

Is he who loathes our stone-cold tiles,

Who bathes in seas of maize.