C₁₇H₂₁NO₄

1.

In April 1505, as Spanish cruelty was soaking

into the ground on the Inca coca plantations.

the coca bush, with its characteristic velvety swishing,

marched into Europe.

You’re telling me this, your fingers embracing the bottle’s

cool neck, and the bottle in turn the black, ribbed taste:

a double encirclement. As you open it, the hiss bends

up, and out foam the 2020s onto the damask tablecloth.

A pact, I’m telling you, between the market and tradition,

and just look at the privileges that came along with it!

The name stayed, but the active agent was left in the past,

dropped from the list of ingredients early in the century.

Now all we speculate about is the proportion of sugars

in the Eastern European versions:

how they adjust this to the local political climate,

the prevailing meteorological conditions.

2.

It took time for Amerigo Vespucci to notice the

the Peruvian silver miners’ unusual staying power.

By then, they’d been paying their taxes to the Spanish 

with the bright green leaves for ages.

You say what was internal strife in the mother country

was stifling calm in the colonies.

So, I’m Abraham Cowley, trustworthy,

discreet secretary to the King of England,

and I’m just composing the first written record

of the coca bush in verse form:

‘O, Western Africa, Mexico, Columbia!

You can cut the diversity in your jungles with a knife,

and the evergreens tower twenty to thirty feet high!

Produce for us your longish, egg-shaped leaves,

Your golden, red-veined flowers!

Put out for us your clustering, five-follicled fruits!

O, mallow-flowered order, O pantropical taxon, O!’

3.

You’re picking at the label resignedly, the twirly

Spencerian script, the white ribbon on a red disc.

We’ll never know what secret ingredients were held

in the secure vaults of the Sun Trust Bank. If they contained

tears of Corsican prickly pear, sweat of fire salamander.

What is the patching up of a recipe torn in half

between two company directors prone to taking offence?

What is it, if not the loveliest token of the meeting of

two minds? Meanwhile, the spicy black scent of the cola nut  

lingers in the air, weaving its way through the centuries.

4.

The glimmering liquid reflects sleepless Freud

wandering at night through almost every

ward of the Allgemeines Krankenhaus, while

morphinism, migraines and impotence lose, for now,

their battle with benzoylecgonine methyl ester.

Next, a group of  ’56 emigrants, clambering excitedly

off the ship at Camp Kilmer. Lining up at the port’s

only cola vending machine.

And now, before our eyes, the star-shaped freeways are smudged

strips of brightness in the watered-down Atlanta night.

Crows between dark furrows in the fields, somewhere

near the bottling plant at Dunaharaszti.

©Anna Bentley 2022 for the English translation