Night Samba. (Samba de Noite)

The garden lizard bolts like a green arrow

loosed, unintentionally by my slow advance.

Rashly it wriggles through the taut wire mesh

into the cage of restless marmosets.    

 

Skeltering round the walls in a frenzy it dodges

one, avoids another only to be grabbed by a third.

There is stillness for an instant as it hangs

like a stunned fish from a tiny mouth.

 

To my dismay, as it is pulled asunder

and eaten, the monkey’s eyes flashing     

around the pen, I see nothing here beyond

the ordinary and strictly commonplace.

 

Here in Bahia life and death are instantaneous.

No slow turn around of the seasons here, where,

 wasteland fires spontaneously in the Sun

and Biblical rains flood streams of garbage

 

down from the Favelas where teenage boys,

peering  from unglazed windows, prefigure

tired old men in identical coloured T‑shirts.

It is always eat now, or yourself be eaten:

 

It is make love as the carnivores make love

in a land without vegetarians. It is dance               

the Samba in the seething streets for days

on end with only snatches of repose.

 

Then, at the wake of the carnivorous Sun

as the geckoes pad fetchingly across the wall

and the neighbourhood dogs give voice

in unrelenting choir, only the giant ‘roaches

 

hold still, flapping their antennae at you,

before that sudden scuttle straight through

your legs like demented, tarnished spoons.

But you sink into the cool, deep pool

 

of electric fan‑assisted nights compelled

to study the time signatures of the singing frogs

the art of canine fugue,  the crickets’ genius

for polyphony.  Reflecting on the wonder

 of these you come to see that ‘though its drums,

its’ ‘berimbaus’ and slaves traversed the sea,

the Samba is fettered to the clay and marsh,

and sounds from within the sonorous ‘caju’ tree.