Practically Survival
“Come get lost with me,” she said,
and we girlfully entered the dense forest
of tall trees and tangled plants of the tropics
we had escaped to for our yearly vacation
together, away from the wearying world.
Our hearts in our hands, we left the village common,
and refused to make a mark or leave a scrap
of trail to follow back. We were familiar
with other jungles, but not this,
not this kind of wildness and danger.
Ours had been the jungle of buildings, roads,
Cities and Boards of Governor’s hot on our trail.
That law of that jungle was enough to inspire us
to run, dropping our city clothes as we flew.
What force or aggression we would meet here
would have nothing but natural laws to it.
“We could die here, “ I said, and gleefully
pounded my feet in a runaway drumbeat
in the language of being free, my hand in hers,
sisters, simply striding away from the places we had known
into the darkness that fell to deepen shadows
that already took on the shape of other monsters
we had known, know to well, and known to leave.
“We have survived worse,” she said
as we gathered the Cohune nuts and wove
palms into a thatch, to cover us, for the night.
We drank our fill of the two-cut vines, and
gathered rocks to pound the shells
to release their seeds. We could die here, yes,
but not soon, unless we mistake the vine
for Fer-de-Lance or scatter a scorpion’s place of rest,
or dance the Tarantula into a trance.
Glad for our glasses, we focused the sun
on the dried trunk hair and baked our insects
so we would not have to feel them crawl
down our throats and get stuck in our craw.
“This is no place for a diet,” I said,
scanning the mixes of greens and tree-trunk brown
and the energy the heat sucked from my skin.
We survive. We are new birds of Paradise.
We danced and we sang, and we let our bellies
push up the sounds of our sorrow and anger
until we were free of it. Such growls, such roars
had never been heard in this jungle
nor had ever been allowed in that other world.
We carved our initials into a trunk, our idols,
and gave them goddess names.
We knew our enemies well and never crossed
back into that territory again.
If you come to the fringe of an afternoon downpour,
you will hear us, howling like the monkeys,
ecstatic in our tribe of two, old, and graying,
eyes full of bright fruit stare. We are free
mid-life hippies who have escaped from the cage
as a practical means for survival. My sister and I.
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