Testament

Testament Orlando Ricardo Menes (bio) in memory of hart crane Far from the wilds of python roots and those air plantslike the monstrous octopi that doomed the galleons,Hart straggles into his little garden by the seaand falls under the spell of mimosas to find a parchment leaf,clusia rosea, to inscribe the words roiling in his mind,as castaways once scrawled their prayers—perhaps a new poemabout the Cuba that makes his body sweat with desireor fear or both in those sweltering nights beneath the mosquito net.What had brought the poet to this island, anyway?To live cheaply and have plenty of time to write?Perhaps something much more Romantic, sexy, like dreamingof sailor boys with cinnamon breath and peachy skinwho fuck him singing sea chanteys in jasmine fogthick as clotted cream? Or that molasses sunsetthat jolted him to think of New England's emerald hillsrather than this island, so much the bastard girlof a failed empire and the concubine of chaos,bewitching with her Circean smells of Spanish roseand African lily and that to stay whole and sanea full-blooded American must flee those vapors and huesthat mire a civilized mind with a wantonnessimpervious to any reason or decorous discipline,as if an English garden were mobbed by marabú weeds.So treasonous are the tropics, he'd heard a Dutch ensignsay in a sawdust bar by the wharf of sighs,that any man of sense should avoid this island's [End Page 31] womanly seas fuming the shore with the spumeof love betrayed not so much as in a man but a child,a boy too young to understand the volatile heart,and Hart then remembered his own mother, whose affectionscould go from warm to scalding in an instantas these inconstant waters of a tropics too close to the sun,and he felt trapped as never before in memoriesof possession in a house ruled by his mother's moodsthat no alcohol could assuage or poem trick to art. [End Page 32] Orlando Ricardo Menes orlando ricardo menes is an NEA Fellow and the author of seven poetry collections, including The Gospel of Wildflowers & Weeds. He is a professor of English at the University of Notre Dame. Copyright © 2023 Yale University