Malaria, Poems

Landscape

54 LANDSCAPE “Malaria is far and away the disease most frequently mentioned by Shakespeare, a favorite metaphor for all things wicked.” — Politicworm, “Shakespeare and Medicine” If I could tell you all the names, it wouldn’t be the same, so I’ll say my feet sink slightly into the soft soil but not enough that it comes up over my toenails . A blood red ant just carried a twig that must have been three times its own bodyweight on top of and over my foot, and I couldn’t move because of the power of it all. My ankles itched this morning, and now they are a bit swollen I guess from bites during the night, and my pants are rolled to below the knee, which is the level of most of the grasses surrounding me ranging from dry and rigid yellow cream to waving ocean algae green, and these are the few who can listen intently and sway to the instructions of Earth maestro. On all sides of me there are huts the size of eyelids, and every now and again I can hear some tinkering or some drum or a cockadoodle . Just beyond these huts hills roll like jaguar shoulders, and where they end blue begins and climbs upward with such organization until an orange sun closes it all up like a navel. To my left there is a puddle, and the rain is coming, and when it does it doesn’t play, and it’s coming harder now, and the drops pelting the puddle look like a million mosquitos jumping up and down, but this is because they are on my mind and I was born with the luxury to think of them and the malaria they carry as but a metaphor or simile and not as something that could kill me. Even here where I am if I get bit and do get malaria, I’ll be okay because of where I come from and who I know and what is already in my system. I am here, but I am not really here as the locals are, and as much as I try I never will be. All I can think about right now as the rain stings my head and my feet sink deeper is how somewhere out there or up there or down there or over there and definitely later on the hush will be accompanied by a hum so gentle as to be imperceptible, and this hum is so gentle that this place is still indefensible against it after all these years of days. 55 “No more epic struggle between life and death has ever been waged on planet earth.” — Bill Shore, The Imaginations of Unreasonable Men: Inspiration, Vision, and Purpose in the Quest to End Malaria ...