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Costa Rica

The sheaves of poems blew off the deck, 
toward the Costa Rican hills.
The one about driving crashed the mangroves and
the good-bye poem disappeared in banana tree groves.

Some first lines breezed to a Pacific beach, 
some last lines to a Caribbean. 
When the sonnet flew by, a cow and a sow
looked up from their grazing. The snowy egret 
swooped near the one about Escher's fish.

Everything in life exchanges into something else,
especially words. Those mangos, 
sunsets, howling monkeys in the canopy, 
could rhyme me into the man who left the last port.
I needed new adjectives and verbs, 
maybe "density" like the river hyacinth, 
maybe "glide" like the gray osprey.

And when the winds reverse 
perhaps those poems will all fly back  
rearranged, fonted with this new place, 
all the better for their night out in the jungle,

so that the one about my childhood
will reminisce about a village,
and the one about you 
can begin with the dulcet fragrance of hibiscus.

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