Nicholas Laughlin: Self-Portrait in the Neotropics
Posted: August 31, 2012 Filed under: 7 GUEST EDITORS, Andre Bagoo, English, Nicholas Laughlin | Tags: Poets from Trinidad and Tobago Comments Off on Nicholas Laughlin: Self-Portrait in the Neotropics
Nicholas Laughlin
Self-Portrait in the Neotropics
.
Eleven of the strange years of my life.
Months on end I lived on tapioca,
I lived on mud and permanganate broth,
and river water red as rum,
bivouacked with rainflies
and fire ants and sundry native guides.
The parrots already knew some French.
Nous sommes les seuls français ici.
Call it sunstroke, le coup de bambou.
I came all this way with half a plan,
an extra handkerchief, and Humboldt (abridged).
Here I lack only the things I do not have.
*
Eleven years of untimely weather,
earthquakes and fireflies and mud.
The colonel writes his complaints to the general.
The general writes his complaints to the emperor.
The emperor writes to Jesus Christ,
who damns us all.
Nous sommes les seuls français left in the world.
I came all this bloody way
to sit in a cheap café with bandaged hands.
I translate detective novels, Dr. Janvier.
It keeps me in dinero, out of trouble.
I miss only the friends I do not have.
.
[From The Strange Years of My Life,
a sequence first published at Almost Island,
which you can read at: almostisland.com (see winter 2011/poetry)]
. . .
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Nicholas Laughlin is the editor of The Caribbean Review of Books and the arts and travel magazine Caribbean Beat; programme director of the NGC Bocas Lit Fest, an annual literary festival based in Trinidad and Tobago; and co-director of the contemporary art centre Alice Yard.
Zócalo Poets 