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Pura Vida

By John Updike 1932–2009 John Updike

(¡Pura vida! —Costa Rican phrase for "O.K." or "Great!")

Such heat! It brings the brain back to its basic blank.

Small, recurrent events become the daily news—

the white-nosed coati treading the cecropia's

bending thin branches like sidewalks in the sky,

the scarlet-rumped tanager flitting like a spark

in the tinder of dank green, the nodding palm leaves

perforated like Jacquard cards in a code of wormholes,

the black hawk skimming nothingness over and over.

What does the world's wide brimming mean, with hunger

the unstated secret, dying the proximate reality?

Con mucho gusto—the muchness extends to the stars,

as wet and numerous as larvae underground

where the ants in their preset patterns scurry and nurture,

and the queen, immobilized, pours forth her eggs

in the dark. We are far from oaks and stoplights,

from England's chill classrooms and Tuscany's paved hills.

For thought is a stridulation, an insect sizzling,

knit of the moment's headlines and temperate-zone quips,

viable in the debris of our rotting educations,

that thatch where peer-groups call each to each in semes

ecosystematically. Great God Himself

wilts with a rise in temperature, a drop in soil acidity,

a new language in its grimacing opacity.

The brain's dry buzz revives, a bit, as evening falls.

Source: Poetry (August 2000).

Biography

An acclaimed and award-winning writer of fiction, essays, and reviews, John Updike has also been writing poetry for most of his life. Growing up in Pennsylvania, his early inspiration to be a writer came from watching his mother, an aspiring writer, submit her work to magazines. In an interview Updike stated, “I began as a writer of light verse, and have tried to carry over into my serious or lyric verse something of the . . .

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