Pais Tropicale

In the tropics, the ocean breezes tease the curtains open and find your naked body on the bed. The sweat has settled in the valley of your spine, beneath the shapely hills that rise out of the small of your back, sticky in the cavern between your thighs. You are breathing, sleeping. You are dreaming. This is a memory that, in returning to you, is sharper, brighter, and stranger: it is three in the morning and you are walking (with someone, faceless now) along the winding path that follows the narrow, familiar, little creek. And it has started to snow. The flakes are ominously big, intricate and enchanting. They are wet and stick easily to the bare branches, the fading grasses, the rocks--black and blue in the half-obscured light of the effervescing moon. Their level of submersion measures winter's fall from the apex of the spring's flow in summer. The various seasons, the pattern of weeks and days. Every moment is a distinct event, a distinct opportunity. You look up. A lovely, spinning flower of snow lands on your cheek. Your heat quickly melts it. It becomes a tear. Rolling off your neck onto your shoulder it wakes you. The sweat again. You remember dreaming. It is puzzling to be lost here--under the Tropic of Cancer--and conjuring up snow storms. They are as out of place here, as you are.