Figuera da Foz

1.
Salazar jailed people
who weren’t friends,
flooded their cells with brine
and crabs. They swallowed
or screamed. Who knows what heresies
were hatched there? Fledglings
wobbled on the parapet, burdens
to their soaring parents,
their feathers useless as pillow stuffing.
Until their cannulae toughened,
infancy would last. They clambered
the heights or dropped on the tide,
or waddled the two roofs of the island,
never busy with the inmates gone,
limp as newborns, their muscles atrophied,
dumbfounded by sunlight and water,
but possibly grateful enough to forgive.
And maybe Salazar died quietly too,
his dependents beside him, forgetful
of this mid-coast island, the inmates,
their special crimes, their politics.
Or if he dreamt, he dreamt of fledglings:
had he awoke, no doubt
he would have called the Holy See.
What else was there to dream about
rowing toward an island without a name
to trip upon your tongue.

2.
Only prairie grass
keeps the hills from erosion,
tufts of feathers snagged
on its tares, the eye disinvited
to latch onto detail,
the seedling and shells
blown into ocean,
no more indigenous than flesh–
no ledge or niche, just beach
on which to sunbathe,
the treeless penal island conquered.

They preened,
pecked their neighbors,
replaced themselves.
The down that never grew
beyond the stubble shuddered.
Speckled egg-shells
littered the hillsides
without riches from
navigadores,
beached for repairs.
Stepping-stone to Madeira,
no place for roots to fork.
Why covet attachments?

3.
In the General’s dream
a beak awled an oyster,
the shell dank as parapet walls
down which water trickled
cloudy with cement from stones.
The shell cracked,
the gull bolted down the meat.
This disconcerted him.
The fortress was raised
against such portents,
yet everything you kept in a box
oozed out the seams.