The garden lizard bolts like a green arrow
loosed unintentionally by my leisurely advance.
Rashly it wriggles through the tight wire mesh
into the cage of restless marmosets.

Skeltering round the walls in a frenzy
it dodges one, avoids another but is grabbed
by a third. There is stillness for an instant.
It hangs like a stunned fish from a tiny mouth.

To my dismay, as it is pulled asunder
and consumed, 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 the heavy rains flood streams of garbage

down from the shanty-towns where boys,
peering through 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 with no vegetarians. It is dance
the Samba in the seething streets for days
on end with only snatches of repose.

And here, at the wake of the carnivorous Sun,
as geckoes pad delicately across the bedroom wall
and the neighbourhood dogs give voice
in unrelenting choir the giant ‘roaches

Hold still, flapping their antennae at you,
before that sudden scuttle through your legs
like demented, tarnished spoons. And you sink
into the cool, deep pool of electric fan assisted nights

Compelled to study the art of canine fugue
and the time signatures of the singing frogs;
And as you reflect both long and hard
upon the crickets’ genius for polyphony

You’ll come to see that ‘though its’ drums,
its berimbaus and slaves traversed the sea,
the Samba is fettered to the clay, the swamp,
and sounds within the sonorous ‘caju’ tree.

Salvador, Brazil. ‘86.

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