By night, through dark mangroves,we match our strokes to the mild haunt of coquis and coconuts falling, following
our kids’ canoes & our old friends laughterat the guide’s mischievous invocation of Chupacabra! the vampirical goat-sucker,
keeping the darkness light. We pause in the center of Laguna Grande & drape the tarp over our tied vessels
to watch our wrists get gem-lit, protists spinning around strangeness, bothered into beauty by hands become iridescent gloves.
We hear they live five days, brightening but once a day, their last hours budding. The glint of cold light at agitation, gorgeous,
but there are ghosts in the glimmer near the lighthouse I read of in Espada’s “Alabanza,” honoring the restaurant workers in the tower.
Both blazed, remember. Yet after Maria killed the same number, we slept nights away, calm in the same country.
Technology made the lighthouse of Fajardo a legend the boatman is fine without, but we need to know what to do with this
brief light & how to respect its source. On the return, our children before us, our friend Daniel marvels they were only
yesterday speechless. I can tell he’s crestfallen at the way their need for him has changed. I scan the glitter, broken on the dark surface
& tell myself brevity is what shapes beauty. Consoled by a childhood lyric that somehow I glow with the astral,
but looking up, we find Orion risen in the hierarchy of light at a distance only a story can reach.
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