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| PAMPAS We pulled into the Amazon basin of
Las Pampas with that swing of machismo and warm beer, you know the kind
of jungle town where heat tells time and a Caribbean flavour pulls into
play, to mind.
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We
boarded a dugout canoe and sidestepped onto cyclones, indeed, we are.
Blessed as all web-footed birds, Yacuma River was low that day, my
friends.
We glided below the aerial roots of trees, panoply and canopy. The water, a pure milk coffee, swallowed us into foam, I placed the lips of my fingers and the piranha snapped from the river's glass, sharp marine mouths into hand, catfish, minuscule shark. The sky, a wovencloud. Roots, the scalps of slain Indians, molten into the fibre, broken un-like elastic. El cielo tejido de nubes. Pasamos por raíces aereas como cueros cabelludos. Todo suspendido y todo fundido a dentro de la fibra. Roto no como el elástico. Threatened by knowledge, we receded into Bolivian night, directed by his bare feet in the wild, our guide's face hinted at Black features and there was talk of a slur. He was sketched in art, a machete man with protruding jaw, hairless, taut, a guide with sense of direction. A guide with no sense at all, clutching cobras and anacondas both mirrors and enemies. Nude among poisonous trees, sticking his foot onto fish spines out to avenge their own gutting. |
 View from the canoe, Las Pampas, Bolivia |
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| I threw my skin to bless trains of turtles, high ass
red monkeys, giant white combed manguari, massive open -mouthed caiman
crocs. The river shore brought us mutant capybaras, an unsure species
lying somewhere between the guinea pig and the hippopotamus. Clicking,
we swimmin' with freshwater dolphins, extinct to the thought. All
around us at suntanned riverbends. Dolphins rose from underwater anaconda hammocks and turtle shell pavements, changing their skin colour from pale gray to luminescent pink at will. A happy clan blamed for unexpected pregnancies in nearby towns. At camp I ate piranha for irony, Bolivian wine for beauty and night frogs on my shoulders to round out the meal. We climbed up to a silvered sunset then down to our canoe in search of crocodile eyes that night, the red glow of deadly pustules seen easily in dark. We drank water from tree trunks and swung on vines knowing that humans be damned! by disposition, DNA and demonology. |
 Las Pampas, Bolivian Amazon
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Back at Rurrenabaque we slept
for long hours in Amazon sun. A courtyardfull of mango, avocado and
monkey. A bliss so throwing that three hours of hard laundry didn't
even break the spirit, only my back. But luck has its limits, and these
travels will begin to bite at me with the jagged teeth of a bitch whose
lost her puppies to the dollar. It's already wearing me down, I'm
missing. What can I say that hasn't already been said. What can I do
that hasn't already been done? No matter, I pick at a tick on my right
inner thigh, a swing of the locks, and I join in the fruit of life -
Las Pampas, Yungas, Bolivia 11/97 |
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