Landscape with Swelling and Hives

                        And here, or there…No. Should we have stayed at home,
                        wherever that may be?                                   
                                                            —Elizabeth Bishop

When the tsawaim swam from the deadfall across the path
            (a moss-grown nurse log
hosting a thrumming mess of life in its rain-woven campus),
            when those wasps
stapled my back and sides and face and sent me at a run down
            the piebald path,
when the rainforest trembled, fish-tail palms kicking their fins
            in the green welter
beneath the canopy, when the splotches flushed across my arms,
            my neck, my sweat-licked face,
when the diaspora of venom wrote a question across my back
            in hot letters that left me
cold and shaking and desperately needing to piss, I had no sense, 
             stunned and numb,
that my throat might close, not even when my tongue went dumb,
            swelled like a river 
fat with flood.  I had no thought that the last sight I’d see would be
            a green shriek
of light carried through the trees.  The wasps stung for nothing
            I had done;
the others passed that path before me and, after a while, the chill
            washed out 
in sweat and the landscape tumbled back to form, but, hours out,
            perhaps
I should have made my peace, prepared myself among the pitchurina
            and pucahuasca
and waited for the infinite to break through the canopy in a spray
            of green-gone-gold.
In the end, nothing came of this.  My throat stayed open and
            the canopy closed. 
It’s the distance out from camp—the gas lamps lit and tented
            in the shifting dark,
the house macaw patrolling the piered walkways, little chevrons
            flashing on his shoulders—       
that makes it menacing.  Yes, it would have been a pity not to have seen
            the spattered sun
scribbled down to nothing more than matchlight on army ants
            engraving the leaf litter,
the cuneiform of tapir prints in the mud of that flat-banked stream,
            not to have seen
the wattled jacana scrawl across water lilies with her vast, forked feet,
            a pity
never to have taken piranha from the river and watched them slap
            their gibberish
across the bottom of the boat, yes, a pity not to have read the remains
            of a saddle-back tamarin
(a slur of fur and black fingers) as the fact of a jaguar in the night,
            yes, a pity, yes,
but what now’s the answer to that question written across my skin?

First published in Cimarron Review # 161 (Fall 2007): 8-9.