Little Havana Allegory

A poem by Tony Whedon

He looked like a poet, black suspenders,
            a white shirt unbuttoned to his chest,
a public man who’d like us to think him private.
            His house, two blocks from the gulf, a poet’s
house in the lower latitudes—blue piano,

high air-blown ceilings, scrubbed arches, & brick-a-brac
            (ebony statuary from Dahomey)
leering from an airy mantle: in the kitchen,
            tomatoes on a cutting board, a glimmer
of garlic. A maid in a gold dress.

Doors of milky glass, everything, in fact,
            milky & dreamy, including the poet’s
dreamy hair splashed over a sea-foamed forehead
            behind which on a couch books were casually
(or desperately?) thrown open; a conch-shell

of a house giving onto a garden
            where, a year before, the sea had made
its savage entry; a house, anchored
            & resistant, though the February blow
had carried off his sundial & three deck chairs.

He showed us the stumps of twin royal palms,
            the red dirt, the frayed stuff tossed up by surf:
he meant to suggest he’d begun like this
            a Cuban mill town, a myopic childhood.
Such a delicate child he’d been (witness

his pale verses). What’s left, he said, is this
            and he pointed past the rubble heaped against
a ragged fence to the house that claimed
            its place among relics mostly stucco
of the 50s. Looking closely, I saw

a poet’s eyes, a little rheumy
            prone to fly off at an angle. He
maneuvered me down the sandy walk
            to a creaky gate, and, as a poet might,
he talked in a languid postscript of his bad

investments, his dwindling accounts;
            and so he said, everything now, he said,
was fragile. And just then, quite suddenly,
            with little warning,
his English grammar fell to pieces.

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Tony Whedon’s poems and essays have appeared in American Poetry Review, AGNI, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, Shenandoah, Western Humanities Review, and more than one hundred other journals. He is the author of three poetry collections, three poetry chapbooks, and two books of essays from Fomite, Green Writers Press, Mainstreet Rag, Midlist Press, and Finishing Line, and is the trombone playing leader of the Darien Jazz Quartet in coastal Georgia.

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