Vincent Spina

AÑANGU LAGOON: AMAZON BASIN


Moon crescent at sky center.
Stars bivouacked like brigades of light
against the lightning storms stealing in
from across the black lagoon’s
acid water. The night is

an absence of parrots, parakeets, macaws
—an echo of their daytime congresses,
as caimans, still and silent in shore
reeds, don’t think, only live, only sense
their next meal. And we

are not enough for it, taking pictures
of all that moves and doesn’t, and on
to something else until our bodies give
out like broken wheels. Not enough

bread in our mouths or mind in our fingers
to see a spider lifting a broken moth further
into an eternity of silk, to fathom the cara-cara,
who, like a strangler fig, lives on death, waiting
for the light in which to prune her innocent
black and white feathers. Far away,

mountains shed their rivers into this basin
—expectant parents, expecting nothing,
filling our heads and all about us with
green theories of chaos and beyond.

Añangucuna, the ants, clear cut maps
through the earth, hauling their catch of leaves
to the chambers of their delicate fungus
through the forests of a countless cathedral.