Monkey Morning

Monkey morning


Twin spinning rotaries whirl away, gently grooming the room with a volted purring,
monotonous electric pulsed vibration. Wobbling gently on its radius it spins a solitary song against the night’s webbing. The noises of the day have given way to the silence of the Tico night. In darkness it lies like an invisible blanket, muffling those night walkers, whose soft shuffling muffs the holy sheets, shone through in a million different sewn hems and needle pricks. Small lights tail dance from the cabana's seams, and turn on every breath in patterns named eons ago and ages apart.

I lie motionless pretending not to notice the sensation of movement on my legs and arms. Is it imagination or are the invisible night shufflers moving across the bed? The mind plays tricks constantly, the room  alive in the dark, unseen dramas played out constantly, an unpublished National Geographic before the deaf eyes. The hunter and hunted, the sated, the starved, for Christ’s sake, they even eat each other! I slap my arm just to make sure, did I get it, or did it Houdini like leap to another quadrant, ready to slip up on me again?

Awake for hours it seems, the night goes on like the day before it~going nowhere slowly, molasses like it drips by, one drop at a time, its seconds pile in agony on the next, then stop. Dozing off occasionally, but mostly half alert, I strain to see the room, which now is surrounded by the inkiness of the Costa Rican country. The silences of sounds , such a rarity back home, is commonplace here. No light shines, save the pinpoint holes in the blanket, backlit by Venus and Mercury and Mars. The night drifts on, wandering in and out, what sound does time leave as it passes by the cabana? Is it a rustle in the Guanacasta, or the rub of the mamba on its limbs as it slithers towards the soma? Or the muted footsteps of the cleaner ants as they encircle the gecko?

The green iguana sits like a statue against the azure seas, eyes in 360 degree camber , all seeing, all knowing.

The first ray of brown sun strays from behind the eclipsed mangoes and the shattered blackness gives way to the shrill belches of our father’s fathers, now swinging together and announcing their anger at being disturbed. The barks grow louder like a pack of wild dogs hemming in their prey, they answer back and forth their disgust at being awakened. Tails grabbing the vines their silhouettes glide across the window view,

And answering back, the entire calliope of sounds emerge from the dead night and the afterbirth of morning has begun.

3/07