Two girls sailed under the fat green branches of trees that curved like eyebrows.  At the top of the grassy bank, a plantain spread its leaves across the clouds.  They passed little brown girls swimming and smiling.  They passed a man who dove for shrimp that he put in a plastic bag.  Breasting the painted houses that were grocery stores rich with onions, Coca-Cola and condensed milk, they rode the wide brown river between tree-ridges and palm houses.

As they paddled, the wet thighs of the little girls shivered; water danced on their thighs. They had golden hourglass waists.

The man was a dragonfly.  He hugged his shadow on the river until he saw them.

The water splashed under a great green tree-bridge that grew parallel to the water.  Its branches were red and black like the skin of a diamondback rattler.  In the branches crouched the man.

Yellow butterflies skimmed low across the shallow water. They saw the girls, too.  They saw each other.  They saw themselves in the water and forgot everything.

The tree that owned the water was closer now.  A white horse sneezed in a grove of golden coconuts.

All morning the man had been thinking of the two little girls by whom he was aroused.  Knocking yellow coconuts down from the trees with a big stick, he'd chipped away at them with his machete until a little hole like a vagina appeared.  He put his mouth to that pale smooth waxy hole and drank.  (Slowly, the white flesh inside oxidized brown.)  But now he was silent, suspended from his loving as if by the heavy supple tail of a spider monkey.

Now the two girls passed little clapboard houses with laundry out to dry.  They passed the last house in the dusty road. In the river a lazy boa was wriggling along.

They went down the ripple-stained river, the ripple-striped river.  They saw the broad green rocks beneath the water, the soft yellow-green tree-mounds.  They came to his tree and the man jumped down lightly and kissed them on their budded breasts.

The girls laughed and opened red fruits.  He licked them. They were soft with two-colored grainy custard inside.

The spice of the pulp was like the sweet stinging of the glossy-leaved pepper-tree, whose orange fruits burn your lips when you eat, burn again when you piss.  A toucan chirped like a frog.  The taste was stronger in his mouth.  He laughed.

He drank water from rolling whirlpools; he dove down whitewater to brown water, beneath which his open eyes found chalky sandvalleys, green-slicked boulder cliffs: he grabbed at these things with his fingers and then licked his fingertips. Into the best whirlpool rushed the two girls, lying down against each other, kissing each other avidly, kissing each other's soft flesh.

He fell under the whirlpool.  The other girl was waiting beneath with her mouth open to drink his whiteness but he was already freezing and paling, but then the girl breathed upon him so lovingly and he was warmed.  The first girl opened her mouth; the second one lifted him on through into the sky.

The End