Almost No Memory

IN THE EVERGLADES

Today I am riding in a canopied car on rubber wheels through Jungle Larry’s African Safari. We pass a strangler fig tree and some caged cougars. A female leopard hides from us behind a rock. High up on the trunk of a palm in the Orchid Cathedral, one flower blooms beside a rusty faucet. Afterward we throw our trash into the mouth of a yawning plaster lion and leave for the Seminole Indian Village.

The Village is closed, and though the Village Shop is open we do not buy anything, perhaps because the Indians that wait on us and watch us pick through the beaded goods are so very sullen.

Later I sit in a short row of people at the front of an air boat, and with an unpleasant racket we skim the saw grass, moving fast suddenly. Animals everywhere in the mangrove swamp are disturbed, and one by one, with difficulty, herons and egrets rise up before us for miles around into the white sky.

All day I have been looking at a landscape charged with the sun, and when as instructed by the captain of the air boat I watched the water for alligators, the broken light of the reflected sun sparkled painfully. Now it is evening and my eyes ache as I sit in the lamplight incapable of thinking.

I look at what is around me: the papered walls, the gold-leafed decorations, the table in lamplight, my hands on the table, and in particular the back of my right hand on which today a woman has stamped the figure of a huddled monkey that is now becoming indistinct and ugly, and though I try again and again I can’t remember exactly where or why this happened.