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BRIAN SWANN

c/o Humanists
The Cooper Union
Cooper Square
New York, NY 10003-7120

Carmen Miranda's Hat

He peers out, parting the ferns. He is ready again
to love someone, perhaps construction workers,
perhaps ash cans and pigeon coops on tar beaches,
if he can find them. He walks through shale & granite,
between, on one side, a swamp with big things in it,
& on the other a sandbank along which treads a silky path
leading to a few rows of corn & ginko trees with fruit
that sits on the ground like vomit & a mushy spring
feeding a stream with trout quick as laughter &
a coke bottle tinkering with the sun so he
has to put his hand across his striped face to shade
his painted eyes to see whatever might come through
the sand hills that squeeze the wind so it starts at him
like a flint-head. Now he knows who has passed that way,
urinating in the stream, scratching names on trees,
& who might well again in the foulness of time,
splashing ashore like lost seals, waving cloth & iron pots.
Give me your skins. He moves forward slowly
on what could have been feet, breathes hard, redoubles
his efforts, pushes through scrubby sumac, stubbing his toes
on dumb turtles, the smell of clean sand still in his nostrils.
He wants to tell them Good news, say You are welcome, welcome,
& share again the bounty on Carmen Miranda's hat, pass it around,
tropical, exotic. Here, eat my hat, eat my clothes, 
sure, eat my skin, eat me. But they are not there,
maybe never were, unless, he thinks, they are lost somewhere
wandering about like marsh gas, disappearing like bullfrogs
into their own harsh voices that never could sing &
their eyes may still be out there, though they cannot see me,
wanting me to find them, afraid as they wonder
how anything can be so still & empty, so quiet,
not even the tremor on a twig, as they race through space,
hair slicked back, white-knuckled, hanging on, not knowing
where they're headed. He pities them, but now he's alone
feels again the dew-claw beginning to push through his skin,
hears the whine and whisper of stars sleeping like bears,
gets scents from folds in the wind, time rotting in the breeze
coming from the great river's front door. This was
the world they'd wanted; they'd also wanted its opposite.
What they took crumbled. Now he sits on what remains
of a rock they made in a place they'd created to look
as natural as possible, even burying in the process
one of their own villages to make a great meadow,
& he watches the huge screen, his eyes projecting all

they can imagine & all they know, & then some, for where
they were concerned there was always the improbable
if not the impossible & he has to leave room for that
& the unimaginable for they were big on the unimaginable,
& as he watches he goes around tasting flowers again,
native and foreign-born the same to the tongue that had tasted macaw
& elephant, camel and tiger, giant sloth & mastodon, and,
in truth, had tasted a few of them from time to time--bitter,
bitter. He practices the few words they taught him & he remembers
because you never knew. Yes, he says, you are welcome to my hat.
It is a nice hat, always in season & it will feed you for ever
if you sing & wear it properly. For it is the goddess
Carmen Miranda's hat, on loan. She's going to want it back.

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