Legends; our gifted lad would compose thirty apocalyptic scenes
to illustrate his tutor's thirty pages of text....
The deaf painter, holed up beside those lathes, bunsen burners,
pyrex flasks, wide test tubes
&
rotating electromagnetic
torque wheels
of Franz's shut-down laboratory, commenced
his premiere big canvas
on the lightning-Ii t
night of a furious downpour. The first deluge
in six months, its tormed
without letup
until dawn, while he drafted
his gorgeous tall oil painting of Onima, the historic First Lady
of Bonaire. Boi-Nay, the first boy-man, wheedled
God in the Sun to give him a wife. The Almighty instructed him
to hack and carve a Black Stone
Woman, and leave her bowed
in a low stoop
like an Olympic discus thrower's pre-vault.
And there stood she, blackly
aglow on rock
embankment, as a wildly glimmering night's
electric storm pulsated
opalescence
around her crouched figure,
full-bosomed and sultry, the stars teeming overhead; while above
her brow, on a flat-topped mesa, stood a long row
of tall Iuminous cacti, clear spaces between them ... On the canvas,
they seem to throb and shudder
like animal tails, or individual
blooded phalluses:
one by one, those near-parallel cacti tremble
with their own inner light.
At first glance,
they appear to resemble cactus picket fences
which surround and protect
old Plantation
Estates, scattered here
&
there
throughout the island. But those other ranks are static legions
