by AE Hines
Lying with the man I love,
I muse about a farm
high in the Colombian mountains,
where terraced slopes of coffee
meander valley to peak
and disappear into mist.
There’s still time, I tell him,
to plant a thousand bamboo trees,
watch them leap into the sky,
to nail bat houses to the trunks
and hear the flitter of webbed-wings,
to hear the night monkeys
winding their way in the dark,
leaping branch to branch.
Let the shadows come
and wrap us
in their slippery shawls —
there’s still time to dig
our fingers into the black
brooding earth,
to taste the prickly fruit,
to believe we can grow old
listening to the bats shriek,
and night monkeys howl,
to bamboo trunks
rubbing together in the breeze,
their insistent music
like the luxury
of creaking old bones.
AE Hines is a poet and practicing financial advisor who lives in Portland, Oregon. He is a recent Pushcart nominee, and his work has appeared in recent and forthcoming issues of Atlanta Review, California Quarterly, Pinyon, Crosswinds Poetry Journal, SLAB, I-70 Review, and other publications. More information can be found at www.aehines.net.
Hawaii Pacific Review 