Beneath Emerald Canopies: Her Song, His Heart

1
     My ecotourism is done on a shoestring via an airfare war on a flight to central Africa where my backpacking odyssey into Rwanda takes me into a thatched roof region of the soul. There I taste bananas fresh from the plant and hold a baby in bundled joy in an Africa given the misnomer of the heart of darkness when the light is everywhere. Yet whispers of civil unrest are heard in the cities.
     But before me, the exotic flora and fauna of the forest wait to be explored. I chat with a guide on the road to darkness about her exit plan for when things heat up which I should heed as well.
     For now, I bask in the tropical peace as though it could go on forever. When fights break out in barrooms I thumb a ride to the Central African Republic with a couple whose van is illustrated in their native African art. The woman smiles as though all our tomorrows will be as peaceful as today for us intrepid followers of the moment.

2
     The smoke from a forest being burned for tobacco cultivation hovers over the fields. Men gather at the saloon to smoke cigars and drink beer. A gray-haired man sits in the center of the room with a gaze as though collecting his thoughts. I see into the crystal clarity of his eyes and approach him. He tells me of the mystery of time which flows like a river through the forest of dreams.
     He shares his memory of the crescent of Quonset huts where babies nurse from their mother’s breast. It is the twilight of magic he says. He heard the voices of the planet there his story unfolds. Birds tell stories of impending storms. Trees speak of ancient memories. They sing a melody of timeless beauty. Words are spoken in the rush of a breeze. Rain is foretold in the scent of the air. All this is his gift of words to me, a nurse from a land of winter snow.
     The forest people’s senses are interwoven in a tapestry of smell, touch, sound, and sight. The blood-red sunset is like a clap of thunder. Golden arcs of sunshine pour out of father sky to touch mother earth like a husband touching his wife. I thought Griots had faded into history. But here is a living breathing one sharing his wisdom for beer.
     The planet breathes, dreams, and cries until the language of life grows silent. The songs of the river and forest fade into the night wind. The stars grow dim in the sodium light. Birdsong is supplanted by pixilated people who babble in boxes. He closes with an oaken voice, deep and gravelly like a smoker who could use a cigarette. So I hand him one of mine.
     I reach out to him from across the distance to make a request. “Would you be interested in being my guide? I need someone who knows the backcountry to take me upriver.” The old man’s wordless nod serves as an acceptance.
     The Griot tells me, “There is treasure hidden out there in the forest worth more than all the gold of the Pharaohs. If you spot me a hundred dollars, we can seek it out together, as brothers.”
     “What kind of treasure is it?”
     “Legend has it that it is the kind of wealth that will last a lifetime. It is enough that no matter how much one spends it will never run out. It is the dream of the ancient explorers come true.”
     “That sounds almost too good to be true.”
     “Even if we don’t come upon it, you will enjoy the exploration of the land. That is why you came to mother Africa, is it not?”
     “Indeed, you are right. I planned a photo safari without a camera. The lenses are my eyes. The darkroom is my soul.”
     “Then you will get an eyeful. We may come across a Rhino. Just don’t spook him. I’m not one to play matador with a Rhino.”
     We steadily paddle our pirogue in a lazy glide across the quiet waters of the Congo River. The misty river is dappled in gold. Bamboo creaks in the warm wet breeze. Thatched huts form crescent on the bank. We are carried by current among floating leaves. Our oars splash softly into the coffee-colored stream. We follow the artery of the forest like a tiny corpuscle seeking the source, the heart of the jungle. We land our pirogue and follow hippo tracks on the trail to their source of fruit which we also have a sweet tooth for.      
     We cross a tributary of the mainstream and are
waist-deep in this branch of the Congo. My guide is a jungle Griot in whose wake I wade. Tropicbirds sing us closer to the heart of magic where forest spirits dwell and deep into chimpanzee land.      
     Steeped in ancient lore the old Griot tells me of the sacred trees which he knows like the lifeline of his palm. He tells me of olden times when his tribe gathered to remember their ancestors by his oaken voice which is still strong as the current. I follow him into deeper wisdom under the green canopy which is our shade from father sun until we set foot on land again.

3
     We reach a clearing circled by plantains heavy with fruit. A lazy warmth sneaks into my tired muscles. The old man sits like an African Buddha on a mat of banana leaves. I find my place in life under the shadows of palm trees which play like children on the dusty forest floor.
     My back conforms to the bamboo wall with my seat resting on elephant footprints. His words spell my destiny and teach me a quiet way of being with only the sounds of animals as my teacher.
     He takes a mango out of the pouch which hangs from his neck. With a pocket knife, he divides it into two and our meal is shared. As a light rain cools our skin, he raises his hands and smiles. And I watch the earth come alive again.
      “My watch got soaked in the river and stopped ticking. But here there are no carbon monoxide fumes unlike in gridlock back home. Birdwatching is so much more pleasant than watching the clock.”
     “That is the spirit. Remember you are on jungle time now.”
     “Like the new agers say time is an illusion.”
     After the rain, we walk on. The cool scent of menthol rises from a eucalyptus plantation. After the raindrop ballet, the fields are soaked in the misty breath of Africa which our bare feet drink- through pores like holy water from a sky which sings love. We breathe into our berried branches the aromatic exhalations of the gift from the green.
     The trees send love letters with champagne bubbles of oxygen scented with mint. An invisible angel of air teaches me to breathe again. 
     The gum tree fragrance evanesces into cotton cirrus in rows like clouds sunken to earth or alpine powder for kids to make snowmen. But the harvest needs little hands because the white ribbons are not made of ice crystals and play is an uncle with chocolate bars who visits only at Christmas.
     So I tread on feet of clay in the shoe prints of the old man. Like an upland gorilla, descended from the misty mountains, I survey the new territory of a river world of the lowlands where strange metal crawlers move like insects. The scene is foreign to my eyes bathed in green.
     The Griot’s stride grows like grasses as my steps take me further from silicon chips and liquid crystal. My gait takes me into a chlorophyll world where only the wind dreams us into an oval universe with thick walls of food for the long dark night. I find myself afloat in a sea of milk to be born out of the cosmic coconut. I follow the old man’s lead, step out of my shoes, and onto the soft soil of life. My bare feet touch the earth like a lover. The sun on my face soothes my troubled soul.     We walk in the woods where the trumpet of howler monkeys is an arboreal melody and they swing between the tree branches stirring my ancestral memories in an echo of a primeval dream-time. I am an ape once again looking down from a tree at a cheetah whose eyes stalk me. He flexes his paws, about to dig his claws into the bark in a hunter’s climb.
     “There is a scent from long ago in the air.”
     “Yes, the scent of lavender memories in this forest of love. Can you trace it to its source?”
     “Behold, over there amidst the acacia trees.”
     My earthbound body finds me before a green zebra fruit fresh from Eden’s garden and tended by an African Eve whose bare hands dig into the organic soil. She fills her hours getting kissed by the
heavenly gold of sun.
      “She is the burnt umber Venus that Botticelli might have painted, had he come to Africa, stepped off the canvas. What is her name?”
      “We call her the bird lady of the Congo. Parrots eat from her hand. She speaks their language.”
      I am moonstruck by her beauty. “I will take her home to America.”
     “Only if you locate in a nudist colony. Last time I gave her a dress she ripped it up and slept in the rags like her nest. Can you imagine having her undress at the table for the meet your parents dinner. And when I tried to get her to eat with a fork and spoon, she insisted on licking the mashed potatoes and gravy off her fingers. Take her to a restaurant and she’ll lap the soup from the bowl with her tongue. Miss Manners would be at wits end with her.”
     “Her back to nature mannerisms sound so cute. I am in love. I can see why you called her a ‘treasure.’”
     “Is not a woman the greatest treasure on earth? Where there is food, she makes a meal. Where there is shelter, she makes a home. Where there is love, she makes a family with a little help from her man. Goodbye gridlock, hello dream girl.”
     The woman speaks like birdsong. My guide says, “She wants you to marry her.”
     Her plot of dirt is tucked away in a patch of herbage sown. Bees do the pollen polka for the earth to be with watermelon. Her sweet little grunts tell me that planting is organic for her.
     The three of us join in a circle to settle into the unbroken chain. I grasp his calloused hand with her soft palm enveloped in my clasp.
     Insects hum hypnotically. We dance to Afro-pop which plays on a boom box. Their laughter warms my heart.
     She smiles like the sun at dawn. I tell her, “I never believed in love at first sight until now.”
     She shakes her hips like a disco dancer. She sings, “Yah eyeish pies er wiling.”
     The rhyme in her broken English is enough for me to understand. I reply, “My Irish eyes are smiling for you, my Lass.”
     I kneel before my dark queen of the arboreal mists. “Your eyes are misty. Do I do that to you? Please say it is so.”
     She lilts, “You hubby. Me woofy. I wuv yah pie moon.”
     She reaches out her hand to me and I hold her sweaty palm in mine. “We are swallows returning to San Juan Capistrano in our transmigration of souls. Let us migrate through the centuries hand in hand forever.”
     The stars in her eyes answer, “In your eyes I see the future.”
     I envision my African songbird and me as lovers in a past life. I can visualize us in a circle of yurts of yak herders on the vast steppe of Asia, or among the Peruvian Indian’s tents scattered in a lush green valley in the snow-capped Andes; or when we were Aborigines dancing around a fire in the cool outback night.

4
     The magic hour of nightfall approaches. We follow the avenue of the baobab trees to the home whose hidden history cries like a nightingale in the forest of dreams. The path between the old souls made of wood is cool and dark as the black forest on a gothic evening under the howl of a hyena moon.
     The sky has a salmon-pink tint and the lemony perfume is from the baobab fruit whose sunbeam egg was laid by the snake goddess when gargoyles presided over a kingdom of totems. A Milky Way meringue of nest eggs in her eye is a dragon’s sky.
     We stroll in the shade of a baobab. She gathers a clump of the tree’s fruit already cracked from the fall. Then she giggles uproariously while bathing her bare body in the lemony custard of the fruit. She sings, “Mas tift ta ba pimple, bas a mift ta be tea.” I laugh at her unintended puns on the old Shaker song. She dances with nature’s dessert as though there is nowhere else that she belongs but bathed in the essence of the baobab because they are one in the same.
     She exclaims, “Tree Me We. Ya ate kree aggs wid mah.”
     She scoops some of nature’s pie in her hand and playfully smears it on my face. I lick it from my lips singing “How Sweet the Taste” to the tune of ‘Amazing Grace’ to which she harmonizes, “Dat saged a fetch lass mah.” I smile at her unintentional pun on my fetching lass.
     Echoes of longing sing through my breast, a song of love. The oiled touch of her fingers is slick with pulpy fruit. She caresses my face in slow tease each stroke a blood red rose.
     She sweeps into me like a spring breeze and shares the lemon meringue flavor on her lips in a kiss meant only for me. At that moment the iris of her eye blossoms like its namesake flower. Then I
become the lemongrass in her cup of steam.
     Afterward she holds me in embrace so tight she is saying, “Don’t any woman ever dare try to take my man.” The fire in her eyes confirms her litany, “You are mine forever.”
     She smiles with the unspoken language of passion that says, “Waltz with me until the stars fall from heaven.” Her tug on my arm says, “Let your inner child play with me until we are too old to wrestle in this Baobab pie.” Her coy smile blooms as the silken spell of her rose petal arms enfolds me. Caked in baobab fruit she welcomes me into her citrusy fragrance to roll like children.
     When she licks the pulp off my face, I hear her “Ahhh and Ohhh” as she sings “Mowrning Does Breaken,” in her broken English, a song she must barely remember from her toddler years in a mission church whose God still haunts her. And I realize like a light bulb turning on in my head that she is saying, “This is our day of creation when the earth is reborn just for us lovers to cherish each other.”
     When my face is coated in the sweet pie, I tell her, “I will always be there for you even when the seasons pass into the winter and when the rose fades in the late afternoon.”
     Her wry grin tells me, “Here in the Congo it is summer all year long. You will look handsome with wrinkles. And I will be pretty with them too. You wait and see.”
     She pulls me by the hand with the urgency of the moon tugging on the sea. Fireflies blink on and off like stars in the Galactic night. Their glowing tails light the trail to a house decaying in the forest solitude. Moonbeams filter down through the jungle canopy with a touch of the mystic. We open the door as our phosphorescent friends shed light on the dust motes which are suspended in a silent dance. Wrinkled boots hang pendulously from rusty nails. A salt caked jar sparkles like a pauper’s chandelier. The little-winged lanterns shed light on the dresser that has sinuous cracks like tree limbs branching into arabesque swirls. 
     She opens the drawer, lifts out a book, and sets it on the dresser like an old friend. She opens the pages of her ancestors and finally, I see those who left her here to fend for herself. She holds the album open with its photographs that are brown around the edges. She points to the image of a young woman with love written in her smile. “Mada, mada” is her reverential refrain for mother.   
     But I wonder why she chose to bring me here at night rather than in the light of day. This mystery is revealed when she points at the blink of our tail haloed friends and says, “Good, good, good.” My background in linguistics helps me understand her meaning as, God. For her, these tiny suns provide a religious experience. 
     Suddenly her tears shimmer like pearls. She yells, “No Mada, No.” Then she raises her arms up like she is aiming a rifle. It becomes clear that her parents were taken away by soldiers. I hold her until her trembling subsides.
     I point to one firefly and say, “Mada.” Then my finger follows another with my word, “Dada.” A rose-red smile blooms on her lips in the bones of the night. Their phosphorescence becomes the spirit light of her parents transfigured into angels. I hug her with the knowledge that she will need my love to heal and the devotion to see her through on her journey. 
     She leafs through the memory book like a companion with images of a family she must barely remember. As she points excitedly at the people in the album our floating flashbulb friends let me see
the joy in her face as though she were a soul beaming with joy about to be reunited with her loved ones.
     The little-winged lanterns shed light on the unmade bed which welcomes us. Her touch is the rich earth which nourishes my roots. Her body is the open flower craving my pollen. She opens each petal of my heart with gentle persistence and lays bare my center. She gently cradles my most secret self-holding the vulnerable egg of my deepest feelings. She tenderly strokes the nexus of my sensate swell until I sow seeds of love in the garden of her soul.
     Our floating flashbulb friends illuminate us imprinting my retinas. Our tail haloed friends blink merrily to the tune of her deep-throated warble to let me see the passion play of her face as though she were a soul rising in ecstasy from purgatory into heaven.
     We lovers find each other’s spirits in a shamanic trance such as we knew together by a village fire at the edge of the wild jungle in a past life memory.  
     With the first blush of dawn, she leads me and my toes sink into the mud. My senses awaken into radiant awareness. I can hear the hiss of a crocodile even with the whoop of a rumpus of baboons.
     She rocks her ghost baby of the future in her arms. She holds her bundle of tomorrow’s joy to her bosom. But am I ready to be a father?
     An oval pool reflects the emerald trees. Her canary song speech awakens a choir of forest birds. Her eyes glitter with golden tears of joy.
     My jungle chanteuse sings with feathery notes which rise into the treetops. Ferns shadow her in our rainforest haven where she forms vowels and consonants strung together into words with the song of a parrot but no mere echo. My feral woman builds her vocabulary like a mason who lays bricks for our house of love. “I love you” are her first words but Parrotese is her native tongue. Her thrush song is a flute-like ee-oh-lay, a carol of love for when she is feeling romantic. My favorite of her tunes is that of the African Golden Oriole which is a beautiful fluting fee-ooo fee-ooo and is more beautiful to me than the blown bamboo melodies which haunted me in my youth. Her tonalities include whistling when happy like a canary glad to be uncaged and free. When she is in a mellow mood she harmonizes with the wood warbler’s ‘pew-pew’. 
     My wife points to a tortoise sunning on a pile of dirt.  She says, “Yeet yeet wurtle!” Then she makes a pillow with her hands and lays her head on it. She says, “weam” her word for “dream.” She creates a baby doll out of clay and holds it to her chest and belly. She tells me what the turtle told her while asleep about the tadpole that rests in her pool.
    “My God, even if a fairy gave you a frog as a changeling, I would love him as my own,” I exclaim ecstatically to her.
     Her wry grin tells me, “Silly man, our kid won’t be an amphibian. Our progeny will be bipedal, just like us. When you teach me to speak your jive, we’ll become born again city slickers.”
     I hug her and she kisses me with the fervor of a priestess who has blessed me with new life, a future. I rub her belly to feel the tiny heartbeat but it is too soon.
     One lazy afternoon I ask her, “What is a metaphor?”
     She answers, “For cows to graze in.”
     “With that wit you would have been the envy of the bourgeois ladies in the Parisian salons of the 18^th century.”
     “Then I make good?”
     “You’ve gone from kindergarten primer to witticisms in a month. That makes you a prodigy in my book. Now tell me, what is love?”
     “Love is poppy that grow in my heart for you.”
     “I feel like I have known you a thousand years.”
     “As you know nature, you know me. Nature live forever.”
     “And so shall we. New bodies but same spirits, together.”    
     She smiles like a child who got a gold star on her paper. She speaks like a jasmine scented breeze. “I love way you make me feel. Teach me words to speak my heart to you.”
     My book reading tells me that our child grows legs where once was a tail, sprouts fingers and toes, where once there were webbed hands and feet, and transitions from frog-like gills to a simian physique.
     She sings in a rainbow of notes which hover in the morning mist. The chirrup of her parakeet song turns into a louder, insistent tweweet and suddenly
I understand. Our baby is about to be born.
     I look at her smile and see the shimmer of sunshine on the water in the river. She is a woman, with skin the color of the richest earth and sparkling brown eyes. Her chirps tell me that we are bird people, brothers, and sisters of the animals, plants, and rocks.
     Suddenly her eyes turn into white marbles. Her stomach ripples with each of her wails. She gives birth to a beautiful androgynous boy. Our child is born under a roof of sky upon a bed of moss with me entrusted as her trained nurse. Yet are under the protection of the spirit of the forest.
     While holding our child she says, “Glad you gave me a crash course in English during the last nine months. I wouldn’t want our baby to start off learning my Parrotese.”
     “You must have a brain like Einstein’s. You were a quick learner.”
     “I don’t know who he is but your compliment is appreciated just the same. It was kind of a refresher course for me since my parents started me off on English. I’d forgotten is all. Look at our little monkey boy. Is he not the spitting image of his mother? But he has your eyes.”
     “Glad he resembles his mother, more than his father. Apishness often runs in the male side of my family.”
     “But you are such a cute simian,” she tells me. 
     Her eyes are sunlight rippling across the river water, ancient as the newborn earth. After a month of Sundays, I pick him up.
     Misty rain glows with yellow streams of sunlight and soaks us in the earth’s translucent blood. I feel strange currents flow through my arteries. The forest breathes like a lover sleeping. Sadness creeps like ivy through the garden of my heart. Memories of our African Eden twine in knots of goodbye. A hand squeeze from her banishes my sorrow.
     Our son is secure in the papoose I made for him out of bedsheets from the abandoned house. I gently part the matted curls from her forehead. A smile twinkles like a starlight across her face with a rainbow reflected in her eyes.
     We mist into showers of sunlight on our walk upriver and out of the forest into a new world pregnant with possibilities.
     Our three-day trip to Nairobi on a flatbed truck takes us across Tanzania into the Serengeti grasslands. The hours pass as I watch people in the fields carry bundles of wheat on their shoulders. I watch the brown-skinned women carry their babies into thatched roof homes, to eat, sleep, and dream. As the day passes into dusk and I watch the dying red embers of the sun. My lioness flickers between Serengeti moonbeams; her wild spirit incarnate.
     At the Kenyan border, the customs man boards our truck to look at our papers but our attire is the focus of his attention. “You two look good in those potato sacks,” the grinning man says.
     “Burlap is the new silk where we come from,” I say with a smile.
     Soon we pass onto a bridge. My wife sings Frère Jacques to our baby, a song a Peace Corps member taught her on the truck ride.  
     She whispers, “Ubuntu” into my ear. It is the warm glow of her grateful brown eyes. It is her timbre I hear, her inflection in my cochlea. Her voice echoes in the chambers of my heart, “I will never leave you.”
      My words spill like the Congo through forests ancient as time. “My love, I am yours.” Her tears come like a soft spring rain speaking eternal love.
     My tears answer, “I will cherish you in timeless enchantment, until the hourglass is empty, and the merged rivers of our lives flow out into the sea.”
     Lying in my bed back at our new home with the baby on my chest I think of the long years of toil ahead. I look at this miracle, the child who has fallen asleep in my arms. I gaze at him with the eyes
of a father.

5
     Our bambino grows from a sapling into a pine, still young but ready for mountaineering.
     My wife’s anglicized name is, “Rosie.” She chose it and it fits her new profession as a florist.
     Having watched out young boy grow from a toddler into a lad in puberty I have to wonder and so ask her the question that has haunted my mind all these years. “We practiced abstinence, except for that one time in the abandoned house of your parents. Since I wasn’t sure I was ready to be a father and the jungle didn’t seem like the best place to raise a child. How did you get with child?”
    She replies, “Well, that is generally how it happens. After all, no in vitro in the jungle.”
     “Indeed, such things were unheard of in our magic forest. You really picked up on the things in our modern world. I remember when you didn’t know who Einstein was.”
     Rosie says, “You taught me English and math so I could be the breadwinner with my florist shop
while you stay at home with the kid and watch the Pan-African soccer games on TV.”
     “I am more than daycare. I also cook a mean pot of stew while you are toiling over flower arrangements.”
     “Touché, but when are you going to take me on the vacation you promised? I get all sweaty in the hothouse that is my place of business and could use
some cool breezes from Kilimanjaro. Our son is already ten and he has been pining for mountain air as well.”
     “I finally got our old jalopy tuned and ‘tis the season.”
     The chassis bumps us along the eastern slope of Kilimanjaro. The sun rises in a haloed circle in dizzying loops to lasso the peak while blinding my eyes to the prize of an alpine epiphany on a baptismal summit.
     A woman hitchhiker becomes our guide. I’m at the wheel to steer us onward to the sun stirrups. Our tourist guide has dark eyes that reflect a séance of tears. Her climb is long over and ended in tragedy leaving her to roam the hallowed ground where her man was buried in the flutter of an angelic void spirit.
     The sign says “All Kilimanjaro Attractions.”    
     We take the road toward ascent and are greeted on the slope by African drummers in a fortuitous beginning for our alpine trek.
     A man from Cathay serves potluck stew. My fortune cookie says: “A safe journey awaits the brave.”
     I tell my wife, “Our journey has been safe thus far. We should count our lucky stars that none of us have gotten mountain sickness. Most who attempt the summit are afflicted. Let’s just enjoy the view and linger here without going further.”
     Our boy runs around only to return with a handful of snow. He exclaims, “I found snow. Let’s go make a snow man!”
     My wife and I smile and I say to her, “What should we do now?”
    She replies, “You westerners are always in a hurry to do something and get somewhere.”
     Our boy says, “Let’s sing ‘Frosty the Snowman.’ I learned it at school and can teach you.”
     My wife grins saying, “Well, it is Christmas. Let’s give it a go.” And we join in that classic song breathing steam and merrily rejoicing in the blessing of life.