LADY C IN CUBA
In Calle Cuba, entre Sol y Luce
the Santa Clara convent has banana-yellow walls.
The roosters crow the whole night through
so no-one says they sacrificed the midnight for a sunrise.
Postcards propped against her glass of Tropicana juice,
she writes to distant friends. “The ruddy tiles
of roof-lines undulate like furrowed hills.
A swarm of kites dart to their tethers' ends in smudge-
free skies."
The women lean out indolently from the ground floor
grilles of erstwhile grand hotels. “I never saw so many
caged and singing birds" she tells us. All these window
sills where coloured song-fowl ruffle in some complicated
fretwork cupola, or Moorish onion-dome
of plaited cane. “The dancing in the alleyways
and singing in the cafes separated and commingled by the
combs of ornamental iron. Everything is open yet
enclosed."
The lanes where music and impoverished architecture
roam on crooked crutches, lest they altogether fall,
composed in quorum populae in the long drunken evening
of colonial days.
“As though to find yourself at someone's party, Lord
knows whose,
for which, you start suspecting, it is you who pays."
The melodies pass not more freely through the bars
than coquetry of gesture or flirtatious glance the other
way.
“And the canary swinging in a basket from the branch
too near the indefatigable band, is so abashed,
the barman swears, it never sings a bar.
The only living creature in the city thus embarrassed,"
she declares. The sounds of song are much diminished
in the byways further off. However, there the yellow
splashes
of the electric lamps, in their subdued largess,
allow the eaves a natural avenue of stars.
The children's games are also dances in street-corner
silhouettes.