.................................
Rick's Cafe
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Myself a girl, bobbing on the edge.
Seaside foreigner, Jamaica mon
you got to try this clinking in the glassy
breeze - block the buses from your eyes
and cliffdive, show your stuff at Rick's cafe

Clouds like peaches cream the sky, the eye
is marbled from the sight, where's the kiss?
Behind a bowl of pretty pictures captured.
not on film, the grumpy buses roll with
no smooth sunset sailing to the sea

nothing to roll it in nor nothing to smoke it
from. this stuff is good mon. you shoot photos
from our lemon plantain porch -
and me stretched barely sweet, just out of reach
the dewdropped mango, diamonddry by noon.

Marley turns a buck a fruited punch
no stiffing on the rum - they turn him off
at sundown; tourists leave. they turn him on
at midnight; texans twostep to the bar
restless falling-for-the-real-thing rain.

We for-what-its-worth know ourselves
two suckers drifting in the dying reef.
We won't return unless the record changes,
all-inclusive means a cloudless sky,
a towel for wiping up a starry night.

.................................
Deborah Kilgore
.................................

 
Copyright © Deborah Kilgore
March 1996

...a poem in this room, below the picture, by Elizabeth Haight...
The way back home
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