Here the palm and lawn,
Under the hard order
Of corporate hand,
Flourish in the crisp,
Enclaved behind a wall:
“Putting the Rico back
In Puerto Rico”—
Golf, made possible
By twenty feet of razor
Wire—Robert Frost
With Third World edge—
Sustainable transportation
From restaurant to beach—
Free-range kids,
Racquetball and squash—
Worse, the people too,
Not their cheap cartoons
But these human hosts—
Are simply divine. There
Is no escape from better things:
Small as such things must be.
Ringed by Auden’s shield
Of Achilles, where “two boys
Knife a third”—wilderness,
Ash and wreck of man,
Made not by nature
But man’s black hand
On “occupied Hapsburg land,”
Here in the villa was always
The spark and motor of man,
The sacred olive tree,
The “golden grasshoppers and bees,”
“World where promises are kept.”
Some would guard this razor
Wall. Some would storm it,
Drunk on powered honey,
“Half-deceit of some intoxicant,”
Che in his Che shirt.
Some would even grow it—
With brightness of sharp blade,
Raising order’s flag,
The barbed red arrow—
For can any world live
Half jumble and half square?
Nay, worry that it can!
The ask is no rhetoric:
None are dumber than me,
A minor prophet only
Of the second-tier apocrypha—
Own life a shambles
With swell of burning women,
A son as yet not met—
I can barely see a now:
An old fool, with hair
In his ears. The afterlife,
Here in Dorado Beach,
Is a place you could reach out
And touch, extravagant
As the crested zebra ducks
On the back nine; egrets,
Piña coladas and marble
Floors; unlocked doors—
When we return, Orpheus
With carry-ons, will
We even be alive?
My pen secures the high—
Booming on a hot vision
Of the world as razor heaven.
An iguana smiles on the green.
A bike passes on the path.
“Small as such things must be—“
And the future smiles back,
Cold as lizard blood,
Made of intelligent steel.
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