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Black cassette upon perfect greenery.
Borges, a writer who ate like a bird,
explained, screwing up his two opal casket lenses: Popular opinion
(which he lamented more than Maria looking up
a second time at her Son’s feet)
Misconceives the blind,
Believing those with snuffed out candles for eyes
inhabit a carbon darkness,
a world without birth-of-light.
More often, the blind see a thick stained-glass wall
Of one single colour, a light blue or amber, a certain Atlantean green,
That color might enter night-sleep, assume twisting form, birth an island.

the song of a bird—on the desert island Aruba, the orange-black
Troupial—might hold so much oases in it, that the man with eyes put out
By fire in the dry woods, eyes like two cactus fruit, in his day-lit séance
Upon hearing troupials
Might know the final oasis.

The alleged Bird of Paradise, a parakeet
Bears relation to a clown-faced lovebird,
Called Preekeechee, on Aruba.
flying over an even smaller, circa Venezuelan island called Cheecheereebeechee,
bugs nibbling at dun roots of his featherspines
its shadow fleeting over chaos of mankind
Until arrival upon the shack-roof
Of Aruba’s village fool, successor of an exeunt poet,
Who awakes without clockwork or cassettes--
only loud bird songs, definite A.M. gunfire

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The trees, ancient masochists,
love being wounded only by talons of non-market singers.
Teenagers with knives believe they fool
Tree-bark into mistaking their knives for bird-talons,
Unlike parents, trees are hardly fooled

The village fool, professional fooler,
bard who argues with shadows,
wipes his butt with Mansur’s newspaper,
talks of the first dwellers, Taíno,
who overheard the rumour
From Tayrona across the trade-barrier:
they said Gods made the sun long after beasts, waterfalls and humans.
Before the sun, the prima islanders mapped each other’s forms, bodies, with mouths, sensata-
tongues, ears, eyelids, shell-knives in palms, not having known any gamma or infra like the sun’s.
Few saw. They salted their sweet foods with tears from faces
of Choral providers, over coral breakfasts.

Green were the wings
of an immense, vain King Parrot,
Self-crowned, he boasted two medallions on his shirt-breast, and cried in vainglory
      this one, the smaller medallion, was the Moon,
while his bigger medal was Inti, the Sun
But then he twisted his own gray raspy tongue, insisting
But I am the sun me, sun, the suit of the Sun. I wear Moon like a fish of silver on my left breast and the little
brother of the Sun upon my right, my oriental breast.

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      And the crystals he wore on his crest glimmered a little the dark world,
sonorous as cymbals dripping in cold and damp of the tropics then, where all men sprang singing from women after women sprang first from land.
The mocker died, burnt bird
Leaving his greenery, a robe, and bones upon the aloe.
And his ulcerous lizard-gray tongue, primordial recorder stone.
And next to that, who needs cassette?
Nobody in this infra mundi