She Sleeps Under Florida

At the Metro-Dade Cultural Center
Plaza, she and I stand before
the directory for the Museum of Fine
Arts, deciphering the signage
that would deliver us to that X that says,
You Are Here. And we are.
What I want is the quickest track
out, the right directions to escape
the paintings of the Young, Catholic,
Homosexual, Full-Blown AIDS-Afflicted,
Mexican Artist, who has known personally
--this from the museum brochure--
Madonna and Andy Warhol while
he lived in New York City, who seems
to know his face only, primitive and
feminine in colors so hard and loveless
that I am dizzy with roses, blood,
crucifixes, and belabored pity. What
I want is to leave, to feel the foreign
air outside that will place me
at some here, some X, any west
of now, that will transport me
to any California on the move. Yet,
she is even more bored than I,
for she has lived Florida so long
that whatever is Latin, maenadic,
or tortured, is nothing new. Having
lived Florida, she has not found
much at rest with the west I have
occupied, the west that is burning
and flaking off from the continental
drift of unhappy Americans, who have
nothing left except for some material
to burn, some hard land to raze.
Rather, she chooses to sleep under
a Florida, or rather, a greater Miami
she loves, and the map she draws
in her sleep lacks names, scales,
and legends, but is crayoned coral,
lime, blue, tangerine, crayoned with
colors no lover could really apprehend.

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