| THE SOUTH
I. Tampa
The train has just stopped
Just two passengers get off on this broiling end-of-summer morning
Both are dressed in khaki suits and pith helmets
Both are followed by a black servant who carries the baggage
Both glance absentmindedly at the distant houses that are too white at
the sky that is too blue
You see the wind raising swirls of dust and flies pestering the two
mules
harnessed to the only coach
The driver is asleep his mouth open
from Kodak (Documentaire), 1924 by Blaise Cendrars (trans.
Ron Padgett)
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Tampa, Florida
To sting a centipede around
A pineapple bend, on a peach -- truth is
Studied on the breast -- abysmally
A picture of a tramp is being excruciated
Betwixt a splintered park bent beach
And truthfully
And in Africa
A pink pygmy
Sits stupidly on a bamboo spear
In the hark wide open jungle
from The Poems of Alfred Starr Hamilton, 1970 |
