the Isthmus to the Amazon
and beyond, spanning the
land’s breadth and stretching
as far south as the Pantanal
that swallows old Paraguay
and half of Argentina, change
has become the only constant.
Except for a few resistant trees
and the immutable cockroach,
this world could be the province
of a being wholly supernatural,
some raging demon in exile.
In those rare human enclaves
that survive along the coasts,
natives have raised effigies to
a creature half anima, half ego.
A few of the learned, inspired
by divine revelation or delusion,
worship more private idols.
None of us are sure of the truth.
Yes, there are those who believe
there are answers to be found.
They travel here from the North,
from the surviving dome cities
where older ways are preserved.
The cycled air in their sealed habitats
runs through their blood and lungs.
What can they possibly understand?
The Mutant Forest guards its secrets,
not by camouflage but by alteration,
certainties transformed to deceits.
The sheet lightning that ignites our
horizon may presage a coming storm,
or be only a contrary precursor to dusk.
A CAUTIONARY NOTE TO TRAVELERS THROUGH THE MUTANT RAIN FOREST
Frazier
If you run deep within the gloomy fringe
where black mahoganies are upright spades
that shudder, shift and moan like ghostly shades,
be wary then of creatures fresh of tinge.
The necrophida moths grow huge as planes,
and feast on corpses hung in cauls of moss.
The kongii sloths will make the treetops toss
to shape unearthly music from the rains.
And blue duendes shriek along your trail,
those shadow monkeys slick and dark as oil
who’ll brave a ring of fires that lick and boil
to steal your soul; you’ll flee to no avail.
Their stares can bristle full with spikes of light.
On them transfixed you’ll spend eternal night.
THREE EVOCATIONS OF THE MUTANT RAIN FOREST
Boston
Evolution
When young Charles rode the Beagle round the Cape
bound for the revelations of the Galapagos,
little did he know that war and rampant
radiation would turn this continent
he circumnavigated into a land
which would first prove his
theories of survival
and selection,
not in millennia but months,
and with like rapidity prove them
as useless as Newton’s linear equations
to the curving temporal attenuations of space.
And now even his special island is rife
with protean life and the unique
and isolated species he once
cataloged with such care
have vanished
in an onslaught far more
unique and constantly changing,
more fertile than flights of pure imagination.
Expansion
From space, with each revolution of the planet,
the dark arboreal palimpsest seems to lengthen.
In the time lapsed motion of satellite tapes,
it swells like a gargantuan amoeba in mitosis.
Rio. Caracas. Sao Paulo. The coastal cities
which survive do so by a daily confrontation.
The lines of armor clad troops advance warily,
spraying gouts of liquid fire into the wilds.
Napalm. Cyanogen. Agent Orange. A poison rain
of defoliants and excoriation falls in waves
from the decks of combat planes and choppers,
yet the flames are strangely dampened and die.
In a makeshift refugee camp, a native Indio
from the abandoned interior, drafted to fight,
sleeps in battle fatigues by his pregnant wife.
All his dreams have been transformed to frights
in which the serpentine vines he burns by day
have rooted deep within their displaced lives,
to twine and strangulate the bloody umbilical
and suffocate the breath of his unborn child.
Elan Vital
Beyond the claws of bestial battle,
beyond the green on green attrition,
some say a force is dwelling here
which links its manifold creations,
a rank and raging barbaric spirit,
a dim but still awakening sentience,
which touches and taints our souls
and gives rise to stray obsessions.
The banks of thunderous cumuli
stacked against the Andes range,
fall east to meet miasmic mists
which rise in streaming drifts
from the swamps of lowland basins,
and in this airborne compilation
dense and brackish figures evolve
in an endless surreal cinemontage
of unconscious organic visions.
Some say that far and farther south
beyond the Rivers Negro and Parana,
beyond the encroaching vegetation,
a retreating tribe has suffered
an enchantment and possession
in the shadow of the forest wall,
for now they divinate its growth
and foretell our changeling future
as they read the clouds’ collisions.
TRACKING THROUGH THE MUTANT RAIN FOREST
Frazier
In the twilit ceibas above our camp,
here on the edge of the Mutant Rain Forest,
a neon toucan cycles light;
it blends with other birds that blink like
constellations in the forest canopy.
Genna points to a log mossy with
lapis bees dueling lime ants.
The foxfire toads glow like golden fungi
while a row of wood mushrooms mimics them
in turn, poisoning one for its nutrients.
Even some of the cloud pools, ringing
us like the footprints of the monster
we track, are not what they seem—
tiny tongues of quicksilver lapping
at the profusion of growth and decay.
Further up the emerald mountain, Jorge has
found a freshly slaughtered jaguar already
veined over with a netting of blood-root.
Our quarry may still be far ahead, reminds Genna.
I shrug and stir our bubbling pot of mate.
At night in our tents we listen,
sweating and burning as with fever,
to the jungle toss and turn.
Genna whispers, how, how can we find him?
Sleep presses on us like a weight.
In dreams, I know that Genna is right;
a vision sputters like a volcano in my head.
Far ahead, wreathed in ethereal light,
a path winds into a lost horizon where only
new creatures—of a new bestiary—may follow.
At dawn Genna stirs and rubs against me.
I hold her, drowsy and disoriented.
From high on the mist-shrouded mountain,
an unearthly cry rises like a breeze
and fades with the last dregs of night.
NIGHT FISHING ON THE CARIBBEAN LITTORAL
Boston/Frazier
Out beyond a humid sluggish slip of coast where
mangrove cays nose under like scuttl
ed battleships,
beyond the corrugated tin hovels where Obeah ladies
stir their gruely brews of blue magic on to dawn,
beyond the hanging carcasses of loggerheads and crocs
yellowing to decay in the moon’s carious light,
a patch of the Mutant Rain Forest shudders lifelike
in the wake of a tropical squall, spooking the Caribs
who night fish from a rickety stilt-legged pier,
causing them to blow their morning conches
and pipe a dire revelry to the dark wind above.
I’ve heard a Carib whisper of stunted duendes,
hairy four-fingered throwbacks who fly the canopy,
fleeting as ghosts, and “cut de t’umbs of de unwary”
because “dey so bad wanna be like us, mon.”
I have listened to tales of the woohli’s immense jaws,
enough to swallow a jaguar whole, or whole men,
or “scoop de manatees” into its barrel belly by threes;
yet these are common mutations, Campe insists
as we motor past jumbled slag heaps of broken coral
to navigate the verdant delta of the Rio Mysterioso.
This handsome mestizo who trails a feathered streamer
from his cayuca speaks to me of the dreadful dagon
who can mimic any creature, who ensnares its prey
by casting a spectral net of temporal dissociation,
I imagine other bête noires myself, forms fearsome
in their unbounded multiplicity, a raft of shadowy
anti-lives beyond the tenets of biology or reason
rising from the depths of our shared animal dreams.
Campe’s fantasies lull me with their lyric cadence,
and we leave the Mysterioso and wind through channels
beneath a recent growth of red gargantua leaves,
amidst interlocking root chains of walking socratea,
around several culs-de-sac and into a broad lagoon.
His lilting tongue casts my thoughts into a trance
bound by damp pulses of heat and the ancient echoes
of conquistadors, of rum captains and mahogany runners.
The dead reel past in a gritty sanguine rush
to bare the bones of avarice, the veins of disease,
still bedrock deep in the soil of this changing land.
Suddenly I am transfixed by a reflection on the water,
one that freezes my every muscle in cataleptic thrall:
Campe’s rippling moon-made image does not shine true,
but resembles the spread of a transfigured starfish,
floating up towards me and grasping, writhing in its
fluid moment like a great, severed, many-fingered hand.
NIGHTS WITH GENNA’S FIELD JOURNALS
Frazier
She rises through the low branches with difficulty
the rope swaying as she kicks off mossy trunks
the ascending device ratcheting slowly
she looks toward the leafy green heavens
and shoots one-handed with the vidcam
The Least Bird of Paradise, transparent
save for its milky breast and bones.
And for the faintest pink of its blood.
It picks at lemon beetles and ruby bees.
High in the canopy the sleeping platform sways
the wind moving even the thickest trees
evening approaches and the rains abate
the sun breaks beneath the leaden cloud cover
caught in the moisture that beads her skin
and turns to jewels of blood on a lizard’s back
The setting sun slithers on the Mirror Owls
as they reflect the full spectrum
of rainbowed helliconia and lianas.
Genna slips into the cocoon of her hammock
under the veils of useless bug netting
and writes by flashlight in her book
An iridescent ibis eclipses all
color with its phosphor-bright bill.
One thing puzzles her in these nocturnal musings
a quandary about the future of changeling fauna
life on the turn of such strange tides
What changes are wrought in the world?
How far and how fundamental?
For now the females are brightest plumed,
wraiths flitting across the twilight airglow.
THE RAIN THAT FALLS IN THE MUTANT RAIN FOREST
Boston
The rain that falls
in the Mutant Rain Forest
is nothing like the rain
that falls to the North,
speckling the dome cities
and sprinkling the parched
wastelands with sparse droplets.
The rain that falls to the North
can be forecast after a fashion,
as rain has always been forecast.
The rain that falls
in the Mutant Rain Forest
can never be forecast.
One second you will spy
the sky above, a pure azure
blue through the leafy canopy.
You will spot snatches of the
brightly burning sun among
the limbs overhead and see
how it dapples the forest floor
with patches of light and shadow.
The next instant your world
can darken as the heavens
turn to a swirling gray mass
and lightning crackles and
roaring sheets of water
come pounding down
upon you with a force
that steals your breath away,
a crushing weight that will
drop you to your knees.
The rain that falls
in the Mutant Rain Forest
does not smell like the rain
that falls to the North,
acidic and clogged
with particulate matter,
reeking with the foul
stench of chemical waste,
a rain that can carry pox
and typhoid and cholera.
The rain that falls
in the Mutant Rain Forest
smells rich and pungent
with organic material,
quenching the insatiable
thirst of the forest and
impregnating it with the
seeds of further change,
intoxicating the forest with
its sustenance and vitality,
filling the forest with
endless possibilities,
phantasmagoric
and more delirious
than fevered dreams
or mad hallucinations.
The rain that falls
in the Mutant Rain Forest
is bracing and laced
with tempting flavors
you can’t quite place,
yet boil thoroughly
or drink sparingly,
unless you wish
to join the forest
in its endless travails
and transformations.
METEOROLOGICAL RECKONING IN THE MUTANT RAIN FOREST
Frazier
The vast seasonal fall of rains
upon the Mutant Rain Forest
shapes a recurring climate cycle,
a self-contained vortex that deposits
moisture deep into its cloud banks.
Spanning the core to outer limbs,
a complex ecosystem thrives within,
a hierarchy from protozoa to nanofrogs
to boat-sized water striders who sense
the vibrations of evaporative change
across the woodlands below and steer
the weather mass by innate science.
Sometimes the yin and the yang
of exogenetic forces require
a tweak, a modification, a tail
oring,
then the rains fall heavy with
chemical mutagens and biotic juju.
Sometimes the rains are pure and
sweet as the nectar of canopy flowers.
Sometimes in a severe flood interval,
when the rivers flush the detritus
then recede to their original banks,
fresh protean life forms push ashore to
breathe the humid air of regeneration.
A DECADENT ROMANTIC AFFLICTED BY THE MUTANT RAIN FOREST
Boston
You sit beside the inaudible whir
of your holodeck in the air-conditioned
darkness and you watch the colors
immerse the cube in their constant flowing,
their constant reversals and refrains,
you watch as the impossible landscape
with its impossible fauna and flora
materializes before your curious gaze,
and though you know and know again
full well of artful holographic fakes,
though all the reason in your chest
denies the being of this nightmare world
of unreined beauty and extravagant pain,
a shiver passes across your perception
and snags at the borders of your brain,
and though you turn away to select
another disc, to adjust the thermostat,
to light illegal smoke or take another
sip of something soothing and mundane,
to caress yourself or an imaginary lover
as the holos in your cube become profane,
the visions you have witnessed still remain,
to halt your dreams, to stalk your reveries,
to arise unbidden in the midden of your life
and billow the fabric of your middling days,
like a mystery laden with darkling runes
and windswept afternoons of sun and rain.
LUMINOUS DECAY
Frazier
Clues to their shadowy residency
Are numerous on the overgrown estate
Broken plaster on the upper floors
Edged with the stab marks of pencils
Toothbrushes frozen upright
In glass jars of hardened paint
Aligned by the west entrance
Also down in the sunken lands
Fishing lines tied to hammers
Then strung into reed-choked ponds
The feral young speak a jungle patois
Born of happenstance
French plus aristocratic Spanish
Plus made-up words or sounds
That they all understand
Punctuated by panther calls
The girls dress up from moldy trunks
Left in the staff quarters below
Visions of the Mutant Rain Forest Page 5