ANITA MOHAN

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LOVE LETTERS FROM THE GALAPAGOS

PUNTA ESPINOSA ON FERNANDINA

Black whirlpools of lava
Screwed into ropes
And snapped into sharp
Points and chasms
In blue silence--
The virginal island never blinks.

At first, you spy one marine iguana
Hiding in those death-grey ropes
In that grisaille
His coralline fichu laced over leathery
Skin.
But then
There's another,
A doppelganger--
Your mind blinks
and suddenly you're seeing
one hundred iguanas
Sunbathing with third eyes
Open and guzzling
Warmth as they meditate
and pray to the pacific.

Quietly cormorants build
Homes nearby.
Flightless men trundle
Back and forth from twinkling waters
bearing gifts galore,
bearing sea lettuce and stones,
Flotsam and jetsam and ash
To the women nursing
Ever-squawling young.
These gifts they bear are never enough, the she-cormorant
Abandons ship,
Abandons her gifting mate
She saunters,
Wings flapping,
Wings never lifting,
Into that vast ocean
Into those blue-bright waters
to explore.

PUNTA VINCENTE ROCA

The pungent smell of
Yesterday fills the breeze over
The ocean and red mangroves root in the water
Like hungry snouts brilliant
Against bottle-green shallows.

You paddle over dull knives of corrugated
Coral into that desolate lagoon
And dip your head in cool water,
One sea turtle, two sea turtles, three
Sea turtles, four glide heavenly and gentle and old as fossils
Stranded by El Nino.

And then a science fiction chimera kayaking past
Four tree lions lolling on mangrove branches, solitude
And crabs everywhere modern dancing
To wordless music,
The morning glory, its salmon pink rears from
Amidst endemic yellows and ever-whites
As lovely, as expectant as May.

And one Sally Lightfoot side-steps by
A demented B-movie star
Her dialogue all subtitled in this soundless haze.

DARWIN BAY

Scorpio rose last night
And storm petrels flew behind the ship
But did not bode ill
Bore no ill will.
For in the morning, when sepulchral
sunlight leaks over a cipher of hills
You will still hear the commedia dell arte
Of jocular Arlecchino
and tristful Pierrot
Wooing Columbine with sweetly
Wacky charms.

Webbed feet rouged and glowing, they're unflinching
Behind blue-rimmed spectacles and knowing
Purple eyes
Those masked boobies and
Those powdered silver down, red-footed boobies,
Are nesting everywhere in a dew green kingdom,

Winning big and losing it all
And breaking hearts,
They breed.
Squabbling and scolding,
How to raise babies is the topic du jour
The Babies look askance as you peer between leaves
At their funny faces-
They're supple as rubber clowns.

ESPANOLA

The foreigners never migrated to this sunken, collapsed volcano
This celadon paradise
The people, the hibiscus, the goats with their tropical needs
Were abandoned on Santa Cruz
Drinking canelazo.
They washed down flames of cinnamon with garua,
after it misted and drizzled through cisterns
And the brand-spanking new pipes that paralleled lava tunnels
Beneath scarred ground.

Below our feet,
Before its collapse
This island
Flowed with lava
That cooled and pocked.
The underwater volcano, apocalyptic, dusty
ebony and striated
sanguine brick,
streaked with sand
was crowned with tuff.

Its craters were seeded and
a once-moonscape of ash
was left behind like a memory branded upon the ocean.

The waved albatross with her dark, buttery gaze
And her scumbled feathers
warms and hides large eggs in the deep long grasses.
Hidden lovers duel with gold-hooked beaks
click-click clacking
with memory, with nothingness, with a longing
so unyielding that
their long necks crane forward to dance
as if they do not possess the gene we have,
(that others have)
for the cruelty
of love
of time passing.

PRINCE PHILIP'S STEPS
Prince Philip trails through incense trees
Followed by scores and scores of great
Frigate birds-
Males with red sacs full to bursting
Call plaintively to women from their roosts.

Nestled between hoary-white branches
And tungsten-grey skipping stones
That light up the shores.
Tropic birds, their tails streaming behind,
Circle and glide in perpetual dissatisfaction
At a distance from the warring,
thieving frigates,
That double up to mug
A blue-footed booby.

Can't hop, can't jump, can't walk
Scavenge what they will--
Hard knocks
All around you are Tyrian dreams.

You wade into water, blowing bubbles
And see enormous azure parrot fish
and Moorish idols
and surgeonfish
as imposing as bowling balls in ice-cool
Equatorial waters.

ISABELA

Early morning:
You lumber across six volcanos
Strung together by lava flow
Like dark jeweled pendants.

They approach you
Enormous tortoises in the wild
Steadied as if by a gimbal,
You move, they pause
They listen, you listen.

Enormous land iguana with its parchment golden wrinkles
and red tracery eats berries and creeps
Past painted locusts
Past cotton flowers
licking ash, licking stone for pheromones
Tasting wet air for danger and
Wending along his wondrous, wild way.

FLOREANA

On one side: The island is awash in savage ghosts,
expatriate ghosts.

Cruise olivine salt sands,
Between pencil urchins
The ghosts migrated to this sunken volcano
for its springs.
They say it's the water, but magnets come
In all shapes and sizes.

Flamingoes circle incense trees in Icarus light
Ashen as ghosts against the hillside.
Flamingoes duck their heads for
Fish and their fantastic pink wings,
Crimsoning at a distance
As the flock flies across gleaming waters.

Tortuga rock snorkeling with schools
hieroglyphic hawkfish, angelfish and a Mexican hogfish
Playing pinball. A cavorting sea lion rips into
Sacrificial tuna and
Morsels of fish congregate for bites

On the other side: turtles nest in a snowy beach
Baby turtles pop fragile heads from floury sands
As they crawl out clumsy, nubile already
Ancient.
We see them in dark waves, paddling with manta rays
Moving beneath the gleaming waters like shadows of the
Flock of flamingoes
Frigate bird spies a baby turtle on its waddle down snowy slopes
Of beach
Swoop! Sharp talons.
Hunger gone.

Strong currents whisper loud and louder.
How did that vegetarian die of poisoned chicken?
Did slaves kill their dominatrix with boundless love?
The expatriate ghosts, the hungry frigates, they keep their secrets.

DAPHNE MAJOR

You wonder why
that green bush is laughing so hard.
You've got a handful of explanations.

The copse is alive with Darwin's finches:
vampire, tree, warbler,
So many names and feathers and ululation,
So many darks and lights in the pale breeze.

Glinting beady eyes peer out
with amusement
Curious heads are cocked
question mark heads-
comma heads--
Their chortling punctuates the stillness,
and the dry, pale, hot air
that smells as if the sun leaked its shine
all over the place.

The joke is as it's always been.
A trick or a treat
Joke's on you.

RABIDA & JAMES

Spotlights shine pale green like ghosts
Torn by the wake of a yacht in a frothing
Black ocean.

Constellations sparkle above and below
Blink on
Blink off.
Blink on.

A million tortured invertebrates cry
Out, out, out, in surprise
At this unknown beast passing overhead
On so windy a night.

But we gaze down at these shining green cries
and believe them miracles.
We catch our breath excited.
We breathe out in rapture. First,
We consult on the topic of one token
Of magical times and then at another
Soft mushroom cloud of chartreuse

Hushed, we gaze over the water
With the reverence of a five year old watching
Her first fireworks display.

BARTOLOME

Climbing Heartbreaker, she spies the crater in the sea,
Once embers, now a donut in that saturnine green, and
A sierra of russet and gold and cinder cones
And the smell of ash, the prickle salt.

Jump! Snorkel far beneath that vista point and she might find
Chocolate chip sea stars and
Blue and red sea stars as big as eleven hearts,
And fish: kings and angels
and boxes and damsels
in distress and rainbow wrasse.
Moorish Idols, and then
A penguin looks askance at her from a crag.

Inner dreamscape:
Cold snorkeling with the sea lion romping by at every turn
When she snorts down the salty ocean water,
Her throat sore with so many gulps
She remembers yesterday
Tide-pools that swirled and flushed
Down like a toilet,
The turquoise tide rushing up-out and into portals
in the lagoon where fur seals play.

BLACK TURTLE COVE

Panga.
Engine dies and pretends
To be white fish
Drinking air
Whispering
Sshhh… listen
for song, for sign, from pacific
Green waters.

You might wait an eternity,
yet hear only water
Lapping at mangroves
Rooted in the lagoon
Like veins alive.

Rays glide with mute and perfect grace
Back and forth
Watching the white, suddenly quiet, foreigner
Watching them.

A dream of old spattered rays
Young sleek mustards
All harmonize: now to hot morning
Light. Now to shadows, to shade.

Circle, circle, and watch the fleet of rays fly!
Past the drifting panga, lifting
shining wide wings
Through the ancient face of water
like golden sails.