Tahiti Defined By Tahiti

The plague knew my infinite hulk in 1769, crept through the Polynesian crystal onto my outstretched archipelago black sands and white sands and volcanoes speaking the purple language, the queen’s English to the farmer’s French, and drank from the palm tree to drain the lagoon its persistent innocence. I called that man under white skin elbows unhinged to finger length arms planked ‘cross the wishful shore to the sun, drunk with ambition for Elizabeth’s glory, tracing the black dot of Venus across the infinite grapefruit horizon from juvenile tree-house forts to play science on God’s paradise, James Cook. By definition Cook is defined by mine. A century more defined another defined by my natural beauty and native Polynesian simplicity alive in artistic assembly, though darker skinned than acceptable at that period before the end of a dry English sentence, a man with a watering eye called Paul Gauguin. Had Gauguin’s father surpassed his flesh, he might have said his son taught van Gogh the artful act of goat-fed attrition through blurred lines of lacked definition which persist to define impressionism. And had his father been a poet, not a journalist, he might have taught his son that an island, at its core, is a man, defined by his own accord. Date: 12/21/2018