Gauguin Among the Tahitians

There are nowhere the naked skins,

the onion peel-thin skeins that screen the numerous lights

floating by these humid evenings.

Only the gowns of the colonized, little silk penal colonies

of which I quickly grow sick.

The family I left behind dissolved into photogravures of the new smoke

settling over the city’s simple alleys.

I watched my money follow the slackening tides.

A whore for tourists.

I could have dreamed these black horses anywhere,

where they would have galloped out of the dark

with their slumped rider and flying lizards

and women with twelve toes.

What could have been better than these insolent children

beating each other with sticks?

I blamed my own for every broken brush and Sunday lost

to the Monday stock reports.

I was in my forties.

My knees hurt frequently, I could hardly walk

to the business district.

I sold tarpaulin in the worst of it and my own attempt at bloodletting

was misfortunate.

I will be forgiven my tropical appellations.

Be forgiven my love for the young girls, forgiven for lying

in Negro huts, gray as they were dirty with children.

There is nothing Christlike

in the jungle, nothing ennobling of the sores along my thighs.

But notice the paintings: see how the women turn away

from me.

They stare into the jungle beyond the coronas I have given them.

Even the cow is without interest.

As for me, there was nothing left to do.

I followed the young boy with his axe into the thicket.

I bore my biases and my narratives and my throbbing temples.

My own prison was not to be made of silk or smell of mango

unless in the memory of paint not unlike the blood that ran

the length of my arms

as I struck at the tree of which I desired nothing anymore

but a single twisted branch

to serve me for my fire.