And what would it be like

The terrain of my girlhood

[with you] There is no map

Ok.

Mangoes

then the sweet liquidity of star apple

custard apple

sweetsop

cut with sharp tamarind

washed down with coconut water

ginep slippery

papaya

where restless baby-ghosts vent their furies

all devoured

against trade winds

Will I eternally return to the Trade?

Then ––

there’s more

by which I mean

hibiscus, jasmine, night-blooming and otherwise

by which I mean

the more ancient

pre-Columbian pre-Contact

growth

Edenic underbrush

unyielding thick as a woman’s thatch

like the [girls’ school legend] un-drawered tennis mistress

who

or...

We were standing under the waterfall at the top of Orange River. Our chests were just beginning to mound—slight hills on either side. In the center of each were our nipples, which were losing their sideways look and rounding into perceptible buttons of dark flesh. Too fast it seemed. We touched each other, then, quickly and almost simultaneously, raised our arms to examine the hairs growing underneath. Another sign. Mine were wispy and light-brown. My friend Zoe had dark hair curled up tight. In each little patch the riverwater caught the sun, so we glistened.

The waterfall had come...

I head through the mountains past the Tehachapi Loop, descend into the Mojave, blasting the speed limit, past proving grounds, the landscape like every fifties horror movie I remember.Fiend without a Face. I stop in Barstow, which looks like the town inD.O.A. (noncolorized).

I am almost alone on the road, Verdi’sOtelloon the tape deck.

The opera now over, I scan the dial but can raise only a few AM stations. A born-again-just-say-no radio play comes on, complete with organ and resonant male voice. The passage of time, the wages of sin. I am sucked back, somewhere,...

I ask the driver to take me to SFO via the coast highway. Dimity shimmers on the face of the ocean. Incandescence lighting the water. Lines of pelicans glide alongside the bluffs. My usual feelings about leaving are magnified and I am sunk in a deep sadness. Leaving, losing. I lost my island twice in childhood and have always felt out of place, something missing. Someone once said the loss of your country is the greatest loss you can suffer, save the loss of a child. The driver gets me to the airport early. He wishes me safe travel. I...

The poet has a pygmy in her parlor. The poet with the pygmy (“forest-dweller” to you) in her parlor, on her porch, in her celebrated garden where antique roses climb Crimson Glory American Beauty Blaze. Edged by wild sassafras—one of his gifts to her. Another is wild honey, which he gathers in the woods overlooking the James. What else does he find in those woods? In the forest which is his dwelling place?

I visit this garden in 2003 and find the tailfeather of a mockingbird, beneath a house built for a pair of purple martins.

The African Pygmy,...

The thing behind the trees was a silhouette, an indentation in the earth where the body of a woman had lain.

I will tell you how I got there.

Some years back, 1998 I think, I was on a book tour, doing readings from a volume of short fiction. I found myself in a bookshop in a small town in western Massachusetts. The audience was small but attentive. The bookshop owner apologized for the size of the group. I replied with my usual “that’s okay”—my kind of writing has only in a few instances attracted a crowd—and asked...

The most important interracial relationship I have is within myself. I move through the landscape a double agent, where I listen and learn.

On a plane on the way to Houston, I overhear a conversation between two men. Actually, it’s more of a monologue. The speaker is American, holding forth to a European about Texas history: Sam Houston, Santa Ana, and the Battle of San Jacinto.

Houston’s troops—he says—killed “six hundred goddamn Mexicans.” The Texans were able to accomplish this because the Mexicans were taking a siesta (caught napping), and Santa Ana was “fucking this little mulatto gal...