Author:
Jessica (A Sestina)
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Date Posted: 09:19:45 11/27/07 Tue
The last morning in Costa Rica, and the tropical
sun has no more mercy than the one that terrorizes the desert.
We’re solemn, avoiding goodbye
with small talk, as with friends with cancer,
slowly freezing the local humidity into your native snow.
Watching you leave, my lips are frozen from your kisses.
There was fire in that first kiss.
Among the ochres and pinks and semi-tropics
of my Charleston home, you caught me under a pink snow
of petals falling in waves and drifts in the desert-
orange light of evening, and where your lips pressed, a cancer
of longing grew in me, and when the time came I said goodbye
to my beaches. Goodbye
to the salty air and humid nights that kiss
the skin and the hot, black sky where the constellation of Cancer
is illuminated in jewels. But among the palmettos and tropical
spices dwelt the sense that the sea is a desert,
and at the peak of the waves of heat, limpid and sweaty, I was wishing for snow.
And you offered me snow.
For purification, I thought, to become again pristine, and bye-the-bye
I was scoured by your rough arctic winds, and came to understand the tundra is also a desert
and the bite of frost is the only kiss
the Aurora Borealis have for me. The tropic
of my southern heart only festers cancer-like
next to your icicle calm. I am a cancer
of hurricanes screaming with the voice of angry seas, but never disrupting the drifts of your snow.
And here I am, raging and freezing, in the wrong hemisphere, lost in your Tropic
of Capricorn, my lips primed to form “Good-bye”.
But the next kiss is a warmer kiss….
Maybe under the surface, the ocean is teeming with life? The desert
boasts a few flowers… The most deserted
wasteland holds tiny sparks of life maybe my Cancer
heart could nurture to thrive. With another kiss
you promised to take me out of the winter, the ice, the snow,
And the northlands flew under us quickly and painlessly, too frigid to whisper goodbye.
But though the air is lurid and lush, the core of us is still frozen. There is no heat in this tropic.
So no more kisses, no more looking for life in the desert. You did not melt in my Tropic of Cancer, and I was frozen in your Capricorn July snow. All my kisses were poems, and all your kisses were kisses goodbye.
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