SEASCAPE WITH VESSEL
(for Cizè)
Because tonight—
even before you wrinkle
your nose and mouth
with the sound of Sodade—
what craft in your tone
invokes ten toes of melancholy
on the Atlantic’s azure carpet?
What rasp in your Mindelo dialect
insists that if
my name is Dias-Porter,
then surely I was born
on the 11th island—
the diaspora.
From this distance
I sip a liquid paradox
as the single malt
of your amber timbre
spirals ever higher—
a passarinho’s blue tale
passing the echo
of an old proverb—
“Si txuba ka bem, morri di fomi;
si txuba bem, morri fogadu."
I know why
you plucked Frutu Proibido
to ripen in the night
with the ease of a girl
pulling seaweed from her hair.
But I don’t know how
you charted a Destino Negro
from a path between stars
with the skill of a boy
dribbling a ball of rolled up socks.
The wailing harpoon
of your contralto
could also be aimed
at your sons working docks
in Rotterdam,
or your daughters
waiting on tables
in Brockton’s taverns.
Is the hope
of a rising hull
what kept your eyes squinting
towards the horizon?
Yes, fate can be prickly
as the arms of a pear cactus
and I recall how you burned
through your gift
like Pico Grande’s molten lava
through a new carton of Marlboros,
but for us whose only birthright
was a Gerbera daisy
in a dusty wind,
you meant
both morabeza
& despidida.
Perhaps that’s why
if there is no rain
syllables of your song
settle into our soil,
or if there is no grain
kernels of your choruses
can sprout in our mouths.
Why your voice seems to circle
into the shell of a turtle
yearning to return us
to those ten rocks
whose ruggedness
wrinkles the aqua silk
of our sea.
