O’Connor, Mark

The Sun Hunters

1. In old stories the jungle was busy
2. eating explorers. Jaguars, pythons,
3. piranhas, and giant wife-seizing apes–
4. the rank green bubbled with them.
5. You used your ten cartridges a day.
6.  
7. The rainforest is really too busy
8. to feel you passing through.
9. (Pity the Spanish conquistadors
10. marching for months in full armour!)
11. Mammals in a jungle are harmless hangers-on,
12. though the forest is magic. Twenty years will turn
13. the farmer’s pink elapsed porker
14. to labrador-sized black foraging swine.
15. The game of strangle-my-neighbour
16. leaves little time for assaults
17. on inedible bipeds–the real prize
18. in a jungle is not white flesh
19. but a place in the sun.
20.  
21. From above you see only the glorious
22. Upper Circle, not the slums beneath.
23. Even parasitic festoons seem gay,
24. those tons of creeper riding
25. on strangled boughs. But this is like
26. judging a country by its brochure.
27. Down below is the gloom of green knives.
28. Where cedar seeds patter to ground
29. a thicket of embryos starts the long climb.
30. Creepers fling lassoes, wrestle them
31. down to the soil like roped calves.
32. Promising thrusts to the canopy
33. are torn up by pigs,
34. blasted by a half-dozen caterpillars.
35. (A blue Ulysses floats on up
36. from the sapling it has doomed.)
37. The stillness is of impending death:
38. wrestlers waiting for neckbones to crack.
39. The name of this pattern is Balance of Scarceness:
40. the rarer the tree, the scarcer what eats it–
41. ichneumon eats caterpillar, eats tree, eats light …
42.  
43. The strangler-fig sends out cathedral flanks,
44. vast in its leafless underworld, composing
45. a Gothic hall of arc-and-secant roots
46. around the plundered trunks.
47. Lianas lace all against the storm
48. –guy-ropes bracing a miles-square tent,
49. its poles all slightly suspect.
50.  
51. Master of all is old Python-trunk, the Aristolochia.
52. Follow him, and you re-live history. Here
53. he began, spiralling up sheer
54. through thirty dark metres;
55. the Indian-rope trick speaks
56. of a host-tree, rotted and gone,
57. whose dimensions show
58. in the oak-thick swaying coils
59. like lathe-turnings run to fat.
60. There, near the river, he surged to the light,
61. roamed for a decade over the mangroves,
62. returned to the land.
63. Here a side-stem has touched soil
64. and sent out suckers. Fed from rhizomes below,
65. they twine like smooth cords
66. leafless until they reach the light.
67. Some, missing their hold at the canopy
68. hang the giddy way down.
69. Others have twined their hopes
70. up a cycloned-off stump that ends bare
71. half-way to the sun–
72. around it the stems mat and dangle,
73. stranded on a rotting trapeze.
74.  
75. Here his main-stalk straddled a dying white-cedar
76. and fifty years later fell down in spirals
77. that hang like the bowels of a gutted pig.
78. For five years he tried to save himself
79. festooning the underbrush with coils of flute-edged wood,
80. till down on his luck he sprawls,
81. waist-thick, where a sapling snapped.
82. He rubs on the ground, striking roots, then rises sheer
83. as a bell-pull, the rope of a cathedral bell,
84. up into the light to smother a hectare.