Cayman
“It takes me about ten minutes to get inspired.” This was my typical lament at Collin’s house, where the men gather to write. And so, I took my notebook and went outside for a short night stroll, figuring that darkness was more suggestive than indoor lights. I eased the screen door shut, crunched down the driveway past the four plastic flamingos on the lawn and climbed the footpath and turned left along the dike road that held the swamp back on one side and the Pacific on the other. I crossed the old, riveted bridge, still painted here and there, now closed to cars for safety reasons. Below, beside the black water of the swamp, there against a bank of sand lay–I counted them–seventeen caymans with their narrow snouts and fat bellies, one twice the size of myself, two more only slightly shorter, yet still heavier than me.
I stumbled down the path at the end of the bridge and approached from downwind so they would not smell me. They lay facing the west, listening, I assumed, as I was, to the rumble and thunder of the Panamanian surf. I lowered my profile and crabbed my way toward them, my notebook on my belly and my penmanship pointing skyward. But when I let myself down with a little bump, my legs out straight, with speed that defied vision, there was a thrashing splashing, enough to induce a limbic tingling up and down my spine that they had not come straight at me. When the water settled and my heart slowed and I thought to breathe again, and now with sufficient inspiration, I found my pen and began to write.
I wrote about the Caymans, their eggs, their cousins the crocodiles and alligators and iguanas and lizards, and then acquaintances and colleagues at the university. I wrote as medieval poets do, about chastity and unrequited love.
“Oh horn-browed beauty with yellow teeth,”I wrote, “what is this longing to dance with you in your fetid keep, if only I knew you wouldn’t clamp those shapely jaws on me the bard who sings your scaly charm?”
As I wrote, I noticed bubbled brows watching me from just above the surface, gliding toward me.
“I will write of your belly white like mine,” I murmured on, as I wrote. “But never about that place nearer your tail. What about breasts? Some sort of rounded form that poets love?”
Still silent—to be expected—she drifted closer, rose out of her slimy sink, and dripping waddled up the sandy bank until I thought it wise to back away.”
But something kept me in my place. Was it the look she gave me? It must have been a she, I thought, because I saw some sort of softness below her neck.
Something held me by the left foot. Or was it just the poet’s mood? I read her my poem. She closed her eyes. I like to think she wept.
My audience had grown. Now all seventeen lay at my feet, the moon rose full from behind the bridge.
I thought to sing them an ancient Nordic lullaby. The mood seemed right. We stayed that way until I at least was chilled by the salty mist and decided I should leave and return to the men’s writing group. But when I started to rise, she the Big One opened her eyes, and, with expression, refastened her grip on the tip of my left boot and held me there, as if to say, “One more,” and so I invented something on the spot, “O great beauty of this miserable swamp, the moon thy mother warms thy snout, and even if you now let me go, I would not leave, I love this so.” And with that, she let me go, snapped her teeth in a triple clack. With this signal I saw I was free to go. But since love is fickle and poets, not always honored, I kept looking behind to be sure she had not changed her mind and was considering dragging me back into her murky muck to eat. I climbed up to the dirt road, crossed back over the bridge, and followed my lunar shadow toward the house. Looking back down, I saw the sand bank beside the bog was clear and not one of the seventeen Caymans had thought to linger. The men’s cars were gone, the house was asleep, still guarded by Collin’s four flamingos who never slept. My forty-year old Land Rover Defender growled up a start. My notebook rode beside me, my penmanship facing up, largely unreadable from the speed with which I had written. It was the only evidence of my inspiration. That and a slight tingling in my boot.