Matthew Ryan Shelton
for Paul Maddern
In the park behind the Lemon Tree Café
sits a man in a straw-paper hat
chewing on a coronita at ten o’clock
in the morning. The air is wet with heat.
He strikes half a dozen matches, giving up
at last and sitting back
against the wood and iron bench
bolted down in concrete
on the slope. Roosters strut and thrust
their heads on gangly necks distrustfully
among themselves.
Green with age, obscured by rampant hedge-roses,
a copper woman holds a copper basket,
her other copper hand set to her copper hip,
watching lugubrious ruffled and bulb-throated pigeons
wobbling oblique trajectories
across the lawn. A gathering of grounds-keepers
in baseball caps and bent-back syllables,
loiters under the arbor, their sweat-black faces
flush with sun; bougainvillea twisted up
broad columns, clustering with pink-red blooms
drooped inward in the shade.
Three cocks have divided the park.
One roots at the base of a palm, bowed out and blackening
up, up into the spinneret of a brand new frond.
From time to time he perks up his head
to check on his dominion, scratching
in the flowerbeds among yellow
shrimp plants, catches of pink
bermudiana, and asparagus fern.
The air bristles with the native language
of neon-yellow-bellied birds, black-faced
and white-stripe-crested (kiskadees,
he later learns, from the pages
of A Naturalist’s Guide
to local flora and fauna)
their wrought-iron representations
cast in a statue of general flight
mounted on poles of their own making.
The cocks continue digging. The men disband.
One cock chases another
into a stand of elephant ears.
A third erupts in a piercing shriek
—once, twice—
perched on the head of an obsidian seated figure
on a concrete block in the middle of the lawn.
A woman in a short white dress,
camera strap slung around her neck and flanked
by what looks to be her husband,
carrot-faced and hulking
in a polo and Bermuda shorts,
snaps photos of the elephant ears
and double checks the placard, unconvinced
this is the right place:
“Queen Elizabeth Park, in commemoration of
her Diamond Jubilee, the 21st of April, 2012.”
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