Costa Rica Suite

At the Airport

Delayed between Guatemalan hair

and El Salvadoran sadness,

a friendly voice warns "don't leave your language

unattended", as children at midnight

hold eyeless bears, and women bear

unbearable grievances, and men, unable to be authentic,

still talk a good casino at the Sea Legs Café,

where they play private LA beats

above the din of rolling rrr’s

of those trying to please or be pleased.

No one is doing what they want to be doing

but they all are doing something just the same:

drawing rainbows, sharing earbuds,
working out the fantasy of world integration in one's mind,
tossing tissues at outstretched hands,

explaining the travail of life in a yellow cowboy hat,
shaking a thick mane of hair, grabbing empty

packets to place in his one-piece PJ pockets.

Arrival

The crystal light floats across San Jose at night,

shimmers with a code higher entities understand
and squirrels on the ground bow in honor to,
but it seems to us like pretty lights,

how they almost gasp for breath
in the swirl on the surface of the world

swallowing the houses.

The Meaning of La Pura Vida
God gave Costa Ricans the land

He was keeping for Himself
because they had such a pure heart.

A man in a wheelchair
in front of a home without windows
smiles.

Tribute to the Other Brother

He holds a musket and a bouquet

by Alaheula cathedral
strung, like the blue schools,

billboards and bazaars, with razor wire.

It’s an economic miracle

of indigenous eviction

and farmers abusing oxen for tourist photos

holding machetes saying "pura vida".

Pigeons are free at least to move
in the fountains of Mango Park.

The Only Thing More Depressing than Poverty Is Trying to Sell the Virtues of Poverty

A grey afternoon in San Jose,

everyone is waiting:

for a customer, a bus, a meal.

Each shuffles in a private hell

that glows in Spanish neon

like the shoes hung on the walls

in the "Total Liquidation" Zapateria.

There's nothing between a head

and the polished floors here,

barred doors make some other world
seem hopeless, where one is free
from lords and mercenaries,
the great white culling,
the prison wire like theatre lights

for the tour bus to look down on

with equivalent despair.

At the Coffee Plantation

To be a blue butterfly

and float through paradise

drunk on hibiscus and banana,

reward for a life spent

on the streets of San Juan.

Looking for Monkeys

Behind the veil, a bouncing bough,

the monkey’s white eyes hide.

We hear him cry, through mists of sky
and think of pride, the monkey's eye

we see looking as he hides behind the veil.

Then he swings outside

to find himself a king.

At the Volcano Pool

The smell of sulfur,

the boy said, is

“Indians making omelettes

when someone dies.”

The vulcanologists say
there's nothing to fear,
the earth moves every day
and every day some people die

but be careful of the sulfur,

it can kill you.

Wherever there are volcanos,

there are silly adults the children have to save.

Beyond the Mustard Cliffs

The steam speaks secret poetry
then clears to blue cerulean

and the fairies we can't see

are mirrored in the lake
like time-lapse moons,

and in a flash the density of grey

rolls over again like a thick, thick sheet

on closing eyes.

Rain Forest Voices

Even the elephant ears
have been nibbled down to stems

yet a squirrel makes the fern tongue flap

and a voice resounds in thunder

but I only hear an insect

no larger than a whisper:

"what to write."

Above Eye Level

In plastic trees

a spider weaves gold galaxies from its black hole
for the Gods who do not know they roam the earth.

By the Candy Store

A woman licks an ice-cream cone

the same pink as her lip gloss

while strolling through a high-end mall

where marching bands plays Christmas songs

with drummer boys in white face

and gingerbread men on stilts

backed by six white sousaphones

and is horrifically depressed.

The Farm of the Happy Cows

They listen to Bach

and graze by hydrangeas

on flower cloud hillsides.

Birds in Captivity

Caged parrots with their broken wings withhold from us their song.

The grey owl wants no pictures, until we move along.

The ostrich thinks that she's in charge, scared eyes move side to side.

The emu thinks she's beautiful, knows everyone has lied.

The peacock turns her plumes like car show models spin around.

The crested guan Camaro cools his pompadour surround.

The conure nest in dead tree milk, to sing their songs of life.

Great curassow, huge grieving eyes, comb scythed as by a knife.

The spoonbill tries to hide in trees, but he, alas, is pink.

The boat-billed heron disappears, emerges in a blink.

The ibis sits on bamboo as from Egypt we remember.

The cormorant unshackled looks with black wings to the future.

R2D2 bleep, then a high-pitched radio shriek,

The green toucan learned who he is after breaking off his beak.

The mangrove swallow, white-necked stilt, tanagers say nothing,

The purple gallinule just let its colors do the talking.

Snowy egret question mark neck leans down from wet roots
Of walking palm to beak an eel, a honeycreeper flutes,

And hummingbirds share love with blooms, they float instead of fly

Until another pulls them off to greater love up in the sky.

On the River

A piano bird spreads its macabre wings
as it grapples with the implications

of a bare tree in the green river

then, without apparent consultation, dives

to dance like a snake charmed neck above water

to melodies of snook and tarpon.

At the Oxen Torture Center

Before the coffee was planted,

before the impossible train to the sea was built

there were oxen drooling, pulling brown men's burdens

up and down the mountains, hoping to survive

through constant work.

Now an empty ox-cart

painted with red parrots

is the symbol of the working man

whose back remains unbroken

though his whip is old and frayed.

Along the Universal Country Road

Men sit on benches outside of Soda Willie

where bags of onions and bananas hang down

as if to impress Soda Lily.

Costa Rica’s Mystery

Perfect stone spheres

too buried to be found

and heavy to be moved

until the Gods had been replaced

by man’s machines

-- you know the story –

some signal to above,

receiver from below,

there are these patterns

but they don't know,

the science and the history

still erased.

Resort Living

One gets bored with bathrooms fit for Louis Quatorze

by cabana bars where mint and rum, Brazilian

new age jazz and rave are mixed

for the precise predilections of mojito-sipping swingers

from the far side of suburbia, who hold the world's

sum knowledge in their phone’s chip,

as they stroll a Spanish mission for the God of hedonism,

where umber floors are sparkle cleaned by someone who’s invisible…

until one’s dealt the playing cards beneath the palm-leaf fan.

The numbers never cease to amaze.

In Guanacasta
"Welcome," said the boarded up shed
cotton-candy pink, Esmerelda Poett's
Lost Iguana Hotel, Macrobiotica, Microcervezia,
Eco-boutique, Ferreteria, Discomovil and internet café.
She offers us 12 New Year's Eve grapes and Coyol wine,
so we'll be drunk again the next day with the sun,
and a taboret beneath the ear tree, symbol of equilibrium.
Just be careful of the duck police, the vicious
beaches, the cold killer eyes of ennui
on the crocodile uncomfortable in its own leather.
We're the largest exporter of coffins,

she, finally, excitedly said.

Rain Forest Notes
Everything moves but the waterfall,

the green that can't stop growing,

yearning to the condition of sky.

Red crabs on the forest floor,

torch ginger and bitterwood blooms

like specks of blood in the beard of life.

A sloth on a branch top stares at the blue,

the canopy swings its hairy air roots,
the distant marimba of monkey music.

Above it all, in endless sky, 

vultures circle like the forest flow,

black in the mid-day sun.

Conclusion

The history of this place,

of warring white men's
hungers
and alcoholic despots

who kept the people fed,

seems to have changed
everything on the maps,

in the books,
in the mind,
but not, oh no,
never could,
on the ground.