Pink Dolphins of the Amazon

The people speak of an enchanted city
Beneath the river surface,
Ruled by magical beings,
And those mortals who visit there never want to leave,
For there all is beauty, riches and pleasure,
A place of no sorrow or longing, only music and dancing.

Out of the water the dolphins climb,
Shapeshifters assuming human guise,
Appearing at village festas to seduce men and women,
And steal them away forever to their underwater city.
How easily they fall in love with human beings,
And enter their dreams to bewitch them,
Returning night after night,imploring the beloved
To come away with them....
Such passion few hearts can resist.
Annihilated by ayahuasca,
The shaman swims with the dolphins of the stars,
Learning their secrets and powers,
Their prayers and medicines,
For they are the protectors of the river.
Their poisoned darts can kill.

White and black, light and darkness, flow together,
Life and death, creation and destruction, fear and desire,
In the all-consuming waters....
The pink dolphins rise about your boat with seething bubbles,
Their faces emerge, otherworldly yet eerily familiar,
Melon-browed, long-beaked, delicate-skinned,
Sometimes grey or white, or mottled, sometimes dazzlingly pink,
Lucky hunchbacks you long to touch;
Tiny eyes full of humour and intelligence, smiling mouths,
With tremendously powerful teeth and jaws,
And huge flippers like wings.

Swimming alone, or in pairs,
They revel, seeking out sport and interaction,
Lost twins of man,with foetal human faces,
Navigating the dark by sonar,in trance,dream and echo,
Projecting a sound-beam,
Pulsing clicks at the highest frequencies,
With mathematical precision.
(First fish,then amphibians,then reptiles,then mammals,
Humans float in the womb’s warm ocean,
Learning all the water has to teach).

In the Miocene seas the ancestors
First swam into the Amazon
When the river still flowed westwards,
Before the Andes were born.
The sun and the moon were once lovers,
But were separated by the gods,
And, exiled from her beloved,
The moon wept endless tears,
And her tears formed the Amazon,
River of impossible love.

At dawn and dusk you may hear the dolphins’ call,
Rising to kiss the clouds...
A breath, a splash,a patch of rose skimming the surface,
Floating up and sinking down,
Mother and young swimming together, one on top of the other,
Their long snouts touching,
One flipper trailing along the other’s flesh, for comfort and love;
One dolphin will massage another
By blowing glittering laughing curtains of bubbles
Through which the other will then swim,
Rolling and revelling in the sensual caress of the bubbles on his skin;
The aroused male nibbles gently at the female’s flippers and flukes,
Then they make love head-to-head,or head-to-tail,or at right angles,
Over and over again, with inexhaustible ardour;
They masturbate with inventive abandon:
The male rubs his penis against objects,
Inserts it as a probe wherever he can,
Even into another dolphin’s blowhole;
While the artful female inserts objects into her vagina.

Most of all,they adore the lakes and flooded forests,
Down among the labyrinth of sunken trees, branches and undergrowth,
In soupy thick brown water, electric with teeming life, like skin and blood,
World-womb, the source, seething and overbrimming
With ravenous mysterious inexhaustible life,
Gorging and mating and hunting,
Feeding on death.
This is the giant anaconda,mother of all creatures,
Coiled and breathing rain:
Sometimes a storm splits the sky with lightning,
Crashes branches, rips animals from the trees,
Scatters birds, and then is gone,
Other times the rain just pours for hours and hours, sobbing and heaving,
Grieving for all the world.