Ingrid Wendt

can I say? Most days, I study a tree, and a big outlandish

tree it is, offering big, round berries in every

stage of temptation: a hodgepodge of green, maroon, and black in each

and every fist-sized clump: a pantry of nonstop avian glee.

Why it pleases me so much, I cannot say, but I love to peer—sometimes, yes,

uneasy in my privilege: a desk, a roof, and time—down upon

large glossy leaves and the one bare branch in the middle,

which yesterday hosted the mating dance of the light brown Yucatán Doves

and their coupling, the briefest of piggyback thwacks.

What’s more—delight compounded—the resident Great

Kiskadee, who claims this whole entire tree as his own,

left them alone, although on other days he loves

to rest himself, off and on, on that very branch, when he isn’t flitting

deep into the deep green pyrotechnics of berries and leaves,

returning with a big black berry in his big black beak, gulping it down.

Some days I’m even luckier, catch a glimpse of his yellow-gold crown:

a crescent sun flashing once and sinking back into its own horizon

so fast the gesture is lost on his mate, flirting with berries elsewhere in this

inexhaustible, tropical tree. But not

lost on me, beguiled and trying to capture that high-speed magic with just

one click and failing, over and over, and also

suspending (forgive me) our struggles,

back home, to keep this whole blessed planet intact. But yours

is a question that’s also been nibbling at me: one that here

in the Yucatán jungle, close to the sea, I’ve not been able

to banish, until lo and behold, just

this morning a pair of jaw-dropping, starburst

recognitions rose and stunned me.

Perhaps the most gluttonous soul

in this whole spectacle is not Sir Kiskadee, after all, but the person

writing this poem, who went to these extremes,

to get as far away as she could

from constant news of hate that’s everywhere and all-consuming,

to fill the empty larder of her spirit with the crooning

and blooming and fruiting which has kept our sacred world humming

since life lifted into being. And now, instead of

bemoaning what the world has become, her business

will be—back home among you—to scout out every last high-speed antic

and steadfast miracle still remaining throughout the vast

landscapes around us, each with its own dear casts of characters, for whom

the concept of future doesn’t exist, and to celebrate every

last morsel. Stay tuned!

nurseries trampled by swim fins; three or four vanloads of tourists

every hour murking once-crystalline water with sand (and

more, which would bring this poem down too far to ever rise again)—

nature is never spent: there lives the dearest freshness in this fusion of robin’s egg

blue and chartreuse, this jungle-and mangrove-fringed

scoop of sky that never stops crooning each new

magical morning into being; oh, it’s Genesis over and over again,

the weight on my shoulders

—what humans do to each other and to the world—lifting

each time I slip, before the crowds descend, into

this sun-blessed union of fresh and salt water

where once revolved a jubilation of fishes, a jeweled profusion,

symphonic silence blooming

in ever-declining numbers, a fact which my heart

has almost come to accept—here in the realm

of the Maya, Doomsday looming—because of a certain

refugium, whose location, deep down things, I shall never reveal:

a limestone maze of channels, whose praise I shall never

stop singing, my world-bruised spirit transported, transfused.

with gratitude to Gerard Manley Hopkins, 1844-1889, from whose poem

“God’s Grandeur” springs the title of this one, along with two more clusters of words