The Jungle

 What you say about nostalgia as a shape-shifter emotion feels deeply true to me.

                                                                                    —Craig Santos Perez

My grandfather planted trees

like traps all over his property.

Now, hives like bodiless heads,

chord & creance, hang

from numerous limbs.

More than half a century has passed.

In a photograph of the jungle

time flattens, lengths elongate:

Bees and spiders yellow,

birds redden the émigré,

return blue their steel plumage.

I recount all non-captured here.

What remains of shadow,

duende’s delectable feet

stepping into and out of spotlight.

A plane gnaws on familiarity’s sky,

which falls to the floor of the jungle

one bird, twitching, decimating another bird

into the corner, dragged down

by merely looking at it.

I gather myself and hold the photo closer. Is that him?

He’s so thin, just an angle,

slouched trunk of a banyan. Is that him?

Structure, driveway, an old shed

with decommissioned buoys,

its roof detached by—

Gutters traced in rust. I hear the jungle,

bleached by the sun’s fallacies,

nostalgia’s promise of camouflage,

knocking on a front door.

originally appeared in Poetry Northwest