Made in the Tropics

Made in the Tropics

Made in the Tropics

Bobby Culture (“full of roots and culture”)
and Ranking Joe (“Man Make You Widdle
Pon Your Toe”) shift down
in the gloaming, snap off
their helmets, kill their engines, park
one thousand cubic centimeters
of steeled precision Japanese art.
Their bands drive up
in fur-trimmed vans, unload and unwrap
the hundred-watt speakers, thousand-watt amps,
mikes and mike stands,
guitars, cymbals, steel cans,
at the Blue Room Lawn on Gun Hill Road
by the Bronx Botanical Gardens.
The sun over Jersey
kicks and drops
into the next of its ready-made slots,
and, like a dark lotion
from a pitcher poured, night fills
the concrete hollows, and the grass
cools in the projects,
the glowing lakes contract
around their artificial islands,
the gardens breathe
easier in the dwindling fever
of today’s unbearable summer.
They say the tropics
are moving north,
the skull-cap of ice melting
from both the pole now pointed
toward the sun
and the one pointing away.
But what they say is hardly heard here,
where the cooling brickwork
engine-red Edwardian
railroad flats empty
of their tenants, who gather
in twos and threes, float down
from the stations,
and congregate at the Blue Room Lawn
to celebrate Independence
Day in Jamaica.
The bass line fires up.
From Savanna-La-Mar to Gun Hill Road
the backwash of reggae spirals
to its perch, ripples
and flares its solar wings
along the upended moving limbs
as if a chain were passed through every wrist,
as if a chain were tied from hip to hip.
The sun does what it does because the earth tilts.