Concerning the Thunderstorms of Yucatan

In Yucatan, the Maya sonneteers / Of the Caribbean amphitheatre, / In spite of hawk and falcon, green toucan / And jay, still to the night-bird made their plea, / As if raspberry tanagers in palms, / High up in orange air, were barbarous. / But Crispin was too destitute to find / In any commonplace the sought-for aid. / He was a man made vivid by the sea, / A man come out of luminous traversing, / Much trumpeted, made desperately clear, / Fresh from discoveries of tidal skies, / To whom oracular rockings gave no rest. / Into a savage color he went on.

How greatly had he grown in his demesne, / This auditor of insects! He that saw / The stride of vanishing autumn in a park / By way of decorous melancholy; he / That wrote his couplet yearly to the spring, / As dissertation of profound delight, / Stopping, on voyage, in a land of snakes, / Found his vicissitudes had much enlarged / His apprehension, made him intricate / In moody rucks, and difficult and strange / In all desires, his destitution's mark. / He was in this as other freemen are, / Sonorous nutshells rattling inwardly. / His violence was for aggrandizement / And not for stupor, such as music makes / For sleepers halfway waking. He perceived / That coolness for his heat came suddenly, / And only, in the fables that he scrawled / With his own quill, in its indigenous dew, / Of an aesthetic tough, diverse, untamed, / Incredible to prudes, the mint of dirt, / Green barbarism turning paradigm. / Crispin foresaw a curious promenade / Or, nobler, sensed an elemental fate, / And elemental potencies and pangs, / And beautiful barenesses as yet unseen, / Making the most of savagery of palms, / Of moonlight on the thick, cadaverous bloom / That yuccas breed, and of the panther's tread. / The fabulous and its intrinsic verse / Came like two spirits parleying, adorned / In radiance from the Atlantic coign, / For Crispin and his quill to catechize. / But they came parleying of such an earth, / So thick with sides and jagged lops of green, / So intertwined with serpent-kin encoiled / Among the purple tufts, the scarlet crowns, / Scenting the jungle in their refuges, / So streaked with yellow, blue and green and red / In beak and bud and fruity gobbet-skins, / That earth was like a jostling festival / Of seeds grown fat, too juicily opulent, / Expanding in the gold's maternal warmth.