Escravo do Sol (05)

Escravo do sol she declared herself, this widow
sunbathing topless along the Algarve coastline,
though locals did not think her so becoming,
sprawled languidly across the sand like that,

time enough to waste life away on a blanket,
the sun brazing her skin less the flushed Lusophone
peasant red of vineyards than a bitter brown,
cocoa butter packed in wrinkles and crow’s feet.

She fattened herself with little fishes or sardines
grilled before they’re gutted on a steaming plate.
The spouse's long committment to the grave
gave her freedom: so this slavery to the sun

means to fling restraints away, breasts and belly
spread for all to see, her bracelets chains snapped
to flash as brassily as toys. When she writhes
they rattle with the dryness of a reptile’s backbone.

How far a tan has come from being labor’s curse.
Take the scars of one Angolan, lost in Lisbon,
his facial markings puffed like bees' welts.
Scars or tans or stains can grow up with us.

Stripes across the body can heal to welts
indelible for life, winestains mar the cheek,
beauty spots sew a crucial flaw to the heart,
the duskiest skin burn to third-degree blisters.

C’est la morte the woman maybe wheezed.
Who came to her funeral a generation later?
Did her children or her children’s children speak?
Certainly her libertinage was well provided for:

An annuity cooking her in unguent for years,
in state her carcinoma doesn’t look half-bad,
those morticians magicians. Even a padre
could be tempted to call the face-job a miracle.

In her last days she hobbled the boardwalk
with a cane from her hillside bungalow,
and arriving at "the great mother the sea,"
dropped, dumb fertility idol chipped in stone,

among half-naked partiers heaped on blankets
between night-clubs, ahead of Nordic seekers
in transit to Marrakesh, Maroc, or Moor-land
(hapless Othello’s address before plucked

by the Venetian high command for Cyprus,
copper island, metal of Venus slaves mined).
While in Mauretania, Swedes are appalled
by scars on copper-toned children, escravos do sol,

the sun so strong among sub-Saharan forges
any man-made wound the children improvise,
such wounds as highly prized as chains.