this is where we should be, yes?
(¡Pura vida! —Costa Rican phrase for "O.K." or "Great!")
Such heat! It brings the brain back to its basic blank.
Small, recurrent events become the daily news—
the white-nosed coati treading the cecropia's
bending thin branches like sidewalks in the sky,
the scarlet-rumped tanager flitting like a spark
in the tinder of dank green, the nodding palm leaves
perforated like Jacquard cards in a code of wormholes,
the black hawk skimming nothingness over and over.
What does the world's wide brimming mean, with hunger
the unstated secret, dying the proximate reality?
Con mucho gusto—the muchness extends to the stars,
as wet and numerous as larvae underground
where the ants in their preset patterns scurry and nurture,
and the queen, immobilized, pours forth her eggs
in the dark. We are far from oaks and stoplights,
from England's chill classrooms and Tuscany's paved hills.
For thought is a stridulation, an insect sizzling,
knit of the moment's headlines and temperate-zone quips,
viable in the debris of our rotting educations,
that thatch where peer-groups call each to each in semes
ecosystematically. Great God Himself
wilts with a rise in temperature, a drop in soil acidity,
a new language in its grimacing opacity.
The brain's dry buzz revives, a bit, as evening falls.
Small, recurrent events become the daily news—
the white-nosed coati treading the cecropia's
bending thin branches like sidewalks in the sky,
the scarlet-rumped tanager flitting like a spark
in the tinder of dank green, the nodding palm leaves
perforated like Jacquard cards in a code of wormholes,
the black hawk skimming nothingness over and over.
What does the world's wide brimming mean, with hunger
the unstated secret, dying the proximate reality?
Con mucho gusto—the muchness extends to the stars,
as wet and numerous as larvae underground
where the ants in their preset patterns scurry and nurture,
and the queen, immobilized, pours forth her eggs
in the dark. We are far from oaks and stoplights,
from England's chill classrooms and Tuscany's paved hills.
For thought is a stridulation, an insect sizzling,
knit of the moment's headlines and temperate-zone quips,
viable in the debris of our rotting educations,
that thatch where peer-groups call each to each in semes
ecosystematically. Great God Himself
wilts with a rise in temperature, a drop in soil acidity,
a new language in its grimacing opacity.
The brain's dry buzz revives, a bit, as evening falls.
--john updike
photos (philippines, 2009) © anita aguilar
