Once, during a childhood piano lesson, I noticed that the digits tattooed on my teacher’s forearm were the same color as the inspection brand on a side of ham; they flitted in and out of the cuff of his immaculately white starched shirt when he crossed hands at the keyboard like crabs scuttling sideways on the beach here, just before dawn this morning, at our small house nestled in the crotch of sonsoquite created by the meeting of the Pacific Ocean and a river on the Nicaraguan coast.
I am watching the sun as it slides from the east to the west, admiring our chickens and guinea hens, enumerating the bird calls before sunrise and not trying to notate them, following with interest the progress of the sweet-faced old chancha as she twirls her tail and processes towards me up the beach after her wallow in the river, stopping to nibble on a scrap of leftover cabbage.
The greater herons look on, aristocratic and methodical in their movements even in the moment they throw their heads into the water to snatch a fish. Harold casts his gleaming ivory circular net into the water like a lariat, pulls it out, repeats, his left leg rising gracefully with each throw. Harold’s wedding dress net snares a Lisa, which he’ll use to catch a bigger fish that he’ll try to sell down the road for enough cordobas to afford the bus to Managua to attend a day’s worth of classes at the University.
A few minutes ago, my wife thought she heard the ecstatic hosannas of the elderly African American man back in Manhattan who walks up and down Broadway in every sort of weather with his Bible clutched in his left hand and his right arm waving wildly between 84th and 98th Streets chanting Gloria! Gloria! but it was only a bird singing on the same pitch. I first misidentified the sound as a bumblebee, which I swatted—same pitch, wrong class.
I’m told that I had perfect pitch back when I studied with my Polish piano teacher and wonder periodically where it went. I remember seeing the tattoo when I made a mistake because he would raise his arm to swat the offending digits with his pencil when I erred. Did I err because I noticed the numbers or did I notice them because I had erred?
Just now, my tio dipped his knuckle into my belly button, drew it out, and announced: gordo. I will follow the progress of the holy man as he walks towards Harlem and hope that Harold catches his fish.
II.
In a dream sometime before dawn, Kurtz’s last words from Heart of Darkness came out of my dead brother Britt’s mouth. Entering my dream, I responded, Some Rosebud, pal and realized that we were driving somewhere, looking for my dead mother. Of course, that never happened, but my father driving himself and me to the hospital twenty years ago and my holding up from the back seat my brilliant mother’s head as it lolled from side to side, dumb blank eyes leering first at my father, then at me, did.
Running just as the sun set, the coastline between Huehuete and Casares several miles north was a long narrow ribbon of lava suspended between the towering, mustard-yellow sheer cliffs over which it once poured, and the ocean, which, when met, froze it in place. The drama of time and tide played out on my left as the sun sank into the Pacific and each seventh wave climbed higher, slamming millions of metric tons of seawater into the strand of lava and filling my running shoes, since being trapped here at high tide between the water and the land will get you squashed, then drowned. I felt more alive than I have felt in years, exhilarated by the space and the exercise, the feel of my muscles working together as I negotiated the positas — sweat mingling with spindrift on my lips.
After having used precious potable water from the tank to shave and to clean the scrapes on my legs picked up through inattention at the run’s antipode near the base of the sixty-foot-high cross placed in memory of the drowned at the end of the sandy beach in Casares, I slept, and dreamt of the white horse I call Rosebud, whom my wife described rolling over on the riverbank yesterday, scratching her back in the sand, and of the afternoon in New York a few years ago when, unaware that I was in the middle of an attack of appendicitis, I set to music Philip Larkin’s To Write One Poem with its beautiful image of wave crests as galloping horses.
