The Dry Tortugas

They were building a house in the Dry Tortugas,

less for the solitude there than the open eyes

of a swallowtailed hummingbird they had seen once

on a fishing trip—the early Fifties, he reeling in

an oversized yellowfin, Humphrey Bogart

facing the wind, one foot on the rail in To Have and Have Not, 

she whistling the stuttered call of the Amazonian kingfisher,

and singing in Spanish to flocks of Bonaparte gulls.

It comes to nothing in the end, though the land

is paced off and measured and two palms felled

to expand the view, a road graded the requisite mile,

and some of their friends fly down from New York

to surprise them, circle the islands all morning, gleeful and chic

in their 4-seater Cessna (he’s something exalted at Chase),

and later the bottles of Myer’s and Appleton Gold sweat

dark rings on the terrace flagstones, and someone’s pink

lipstick makes delicate kissprints along the rim of her glass.

No one has told me what happened — his heart

attack in Guatemala, her premonition about the wide

and empty view, or the world swinging in

with its usual brazen distractions — but they framed

the architect’s plans of the house, and this

is what I inherit, a rendering in colored pencil: 

what they were dreaming before I was born.