Elizabeth Bishop: Departure from Santos.

Mcgrath, Campbell

 Awful to blame the climate for all this blissful misery, to call
the fetid, fretful tropics Cupid and pin the rap on scissor-tailed
frigate birds dicing equatorial sunsets into unescorted paper dolls.
 Enter, stage left, the fateful cashew, fruit of Eros'
insubordinate womb: wave a warm goodbye to all those frigid Nova Scotian
taboos, hauled off on Labrador's icy current to Greenland's
fjords or Iceland's odor of herring and sulphur, jury-rigged dories
bound for sub-Arctic islets.
Kah-zhu
. Like a sneeze in Chinese, like a summer home for Kublai Khan as
Coleridge might have had it, had not he lost it, narcotically enrapt, at
a knock upon the door.
O, where is my very own Person of Porlock to stem this lugubrious tide!
Quayside, no doubt, booking her passage, readying to reboard that trusty
steed, S. S. Abandonment
.
Thus ends my sojourn on Crusoe's cloud-dump. Uneternally yours, my
dearliest Friday, very warmest regards, et cetera. It appears we are
under way already, or it is under us. Xanadu is no place for such ladies
or downfallen Yankees as we, eh, Miss Breen? And she: Zanzibar? Now
there is an enchanting island!