Costa Rica

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Costa Rica
By Michael Zack

The sheaves of poems blew off the deck,
toward the Costa Rican hills.
The one about driving crashed the mangrove and
the good-bye poem disappeared in banana tree groves.

Some first lines breezed to a Pacific beach,
some last lines to a Caribbean.
When the sonnet flew by, a cow and a sow
looked up from their grazing. The snowy egret
swooped near the one about Escher's fish.

Everything in life exchanges into something else,
especially words. I needed those mangos,
sunsets, howling monkeys in the canopy
to rhyme me to the man who left the last port.
I sought new adjectives and verbs,
maybe density like the river hyacinth,
maybe glide like the grey osprey.

And when the winds reverse
perhaps those poems will all fly back
rearranged, fonted with this new place,
all the better for their night out in the jungle,

so that the one about my childhood
will reminisce about a village,
and the one about you
can begin with the dulcet fragrance of hibiscus.