Gigantic engines revving and roaring

to life, again, again and again

until everything is lost.



Over and out, the island flattened.



Where Arawaks once watched the mountain

muscling hurricanes off to the right

or left, two massive gashes

appear on a cliff:

                                         Irma and then Maria.



Yucca, malanga, and yautia grew

close to the ground. The rice

tended by slaves of another century

equally indestructible.



Irma, Maria, Maria.



Forget about color, the artist advises,

start out as a spacemaker

on a flat thing with four corners.



FEMA inspectors canvas the neighborhoods

all day, o.k., o.k., hole up in a hedge

fund manager’s hotel at night.



Blue patches sprout on the missing roofs.



Swamped by reporters on a boulevard littered

with signs, the Governor blames

the Army Corps engineers for equipment

somewhere at sea, steers clear



of the mayor who hands bottled water

to student protestors and dances the Bomba

with Ricky Martin.



                                                      The great periplum

rotates past doctors and nurses

testing borrowed walkie talkies—64 dead

or is it 3,000?—past tech-pharma companies

decked out with diesel generators,

the only farms still cultivated since

King Sugar was deposed.



                                                              Back in El Yunque,

the workers clearing rainforest wreckage

from an upper road see clear

to the ocean over downed trees, to a bay

glowing with ancient messages.



Somebody claims to have found Maria’s

dislocated breast in the museum

at Ponce: it is nursing baby

Jesus in a seventeenth century painting.



Over and out, o.k., o.k.