Tuesday Poem: Upolu

The fales flicker as dark falls. There is so much

water here

in the falling dark, here on the edge of this water

so much

water in the air, under the feet, in the hair,

in the

pores of  my skin, in the mildew splashed on the boy’s

white shirt,

in the pores of his skin – polished to a sheen like the surface of 

water 

is polished by low flying birds, by a ripe

sun. He

runs

with a papaya – so orange, so roughly cut, threatening

to spill –

and it will spill down the sides of a mouth onto a shirt onto

a lap

to be washed off by the sea as if the sea is a bath filled and

waiting,
and the beach, a towel waiting.
A mouth
is on the shirt now, pushing up inside, had I seen her? Had she been
waiting?
She is urgent, muscular. But what of the fruit – ?

Not orange

at all in the sudden darkness, and trodden into the dark sand –

not fruit

at all, and the boy is not a boy at all, dark or light, I mistook him.

He is

evening water, he is red earth, he is wide wet leaf, he is ripe fruit,

he is

spilling. 

                                      
                                  Mary McCallum

See my last post for commentary about this one. Upolu is the main island of Samoa where the capital of Apia resides. I stayed there once - not just Apia, but on the east and south coasts too, and then over the water in the Big Island of Savai'i.

Fale - pronounced 'fah-lay' - it is a thatched house. Visit more Tuesday Poems here. 

Note: poem updated at 11.45 am on 26-10-10 -- a slight restructuring (some new line breaks) and removal of the odd infelicitous word. Now the short lines make a condensed version of the poem...