Daily you sport a new skin
tougher than the old one. Rain
sluices off you like fish scales.
Insults, if anyone dared,
would crackle and die before
penetrating that Kevlar self.

While I dream of the tropics
dripping mangoes and breadfruit
you’re accumulating layers
of armor like a pine cone’s scales
So every day I measure myself
by the nearest, tallest pine
and cast my shadow against its.

I declare myself taller, taller,
and the wind in the pine-top
agrees in a language cats and dogs
if not people understand.
Then I spread my arms as wide
as creeping arthritis allows
and touch with one hand the cold
green Atlantic, and with the other
the Pacific blue of your childhood.

Meanwhile you conceal your skin
under the plainest possible clothes
and enter the only world large enough
to absorb your rage. The errands
of the day, like the labors
of Hercules, focus your strength
and affirm your thick new hide.

Despite my favorable height and width
my tropical dreams weaken me
more and more. Soon I’ll stand
only moments at a time, sinking
to my knees in drapes of blubber
so loose they could be parchment
stolen from the holiest graves.

Will you attest to my innocence
if an asteroid arrives to crush
the good and evil out of us?
Your skin would trampoline the smash,
but my tropics would flood and drown;
and when I next measured myself
against that pine an army
of ants would march through my shadow,
sparking reddish crystals
in the depths of their tiny tracks.