So it was I had the first night ramble down the playa of San Pedro town...by Cholo’s neighborhood bar, on the beach, where drunken patrons could sit on stools in the sand belly-up and receive their buck fifty Belikans and a heap of good smiles from Dreddy, a cherub almost mafia angel from Beersheba, a man whom everyone in town knew and liked because he was always buying and had a tender, consumptive smile...if you looked inside both him and his bar, there was yellowed florescent light and a couple pool tables on a white linoleum floor with metal tables and chairs...most dives in San Pedro had this oppressive decor...
But onward we went, past the town cemetery, 100 yards long and piled with tombs, white crosses all sizes, over-flowing currents of colorful flowers fresh or dried like published poems laid in deference and filial piousness...thinking back on it now I never once saw a single person in the cemetery itself, only an occasional drunk sleeping off a night against the beachside wall or a couple young lovers leaning into their bodies with close talk and black honey charms...further along past the scattered resort bars and docks, all the while under the black immense roof of night studded with diamond universe pins holding it all up there...side by side go the mother and son shoe-less and just enough high to carry them the mile home without losing the vibrations carefully purchased from the previous hours...
I dream a fabric in our walk, in self and embryo, as we step across the churinga stones surrounding the mangroves and I can look at my mother now as something other than ammunition, for she is my friend and together we are hemming our history as separate entities, both without spouse, for at that moment we had tjurunga--infant and mother snake-ing through the stomach of time...UNITY...and she could sense my confidence in this, some vast energy building a web of luck around us and she was proud, proud that her years of rearing were fruitful, that I might show the way out, to give and to restore quantities of lover through the poem...
My mother’s house sat at the river cut on the north end of San Pedro town, principal populus of Ambergis Caye, 20 minutes by small plane from Belize City, the senile and castrated capital of Belize...it was a beautiful and simple beach house built five years prior by a young doctor and his wife, who had some children and then split when the M.D. got adultery and left...so mother picked it up at a good price and moved down on a bright November day in 2000, on the heels of Hurricane Keith, the surprise totemic tropical asshole whose coitus with the island had so brutally come only 24 months after Mitch, which had laid the small town flat...it was said of these two brothers… “like Romulus and Remus, Cain and Abel, always two, always murder”...but poor San Pedro town had taken both near fatal blows... “for without a cement of blood (it must be human, it must be innocent)”Auden said...
-Michael Price
