Alligators at John Chesnut Park, Florida, March 2020
We sway the path, and our feet press flat fans of stocky date palms
to the earth like sweaty, overworked clothes.
Our respite today: alligators
still as rocks baked phlegmatic and hot
in the breaks between lily pads and sawgrass,
Ancient, near-Cretaceous slugs of confidence
sunbathing in the valleys of blue herons and hawks
who work for their dinner.
He coasts level through the veils of Spanish moss.
We watch, and are here.
Tight brain-rings of anxiety are miles-minutes-elsewhere away
past his shore, where white line feathers of wood ducks take heed.
They learned social distance before we did.
From the tower, our aerial eyes wander Lake Tarpon landscapes
across greens that break your insides across the floodplains like worship.
Another, long and perpendicular across the canal.
Knife of light in the slate-brown water, she holds the sun.
We are alone, cued away from our species by animal borders:
a quick disturbance of blue herons,
spoonbills that rustle among green elephant ears.
We hear the guttural staccato warning from the yellow billed cuckoo,
and the caffeinated-cricket chirp of the marsh wren.
My daughter checks off her list, a scavenger hunt made for smaller imaginations than Florida: Find a butterfly. Spider. Leaf. We add: alligator, snapping turtle, tadpoles, moss, and the pink eggs of apple snails. And of course, bird poop!, words even the poets cannot control. Because she is five. Because waterfalls of laughter will always be smarter than a poem.
Tomorrow, I play pre-school teacher again.
The lines have fallen away
in my daughter’s world.
I am not ready
to leave the cypress columns or shelled trails,
the laurel oaks or weighted clouds of Spanish moss
or the yin-smoothed crown of the female belted kingfisher
crowing its warnings to the mountain range mohawk of the male.
We turn our backs on the indigo ache of wild swamp iris
and lemon-yellow water lilies grown round waiting for bloom,
on tall sabal palms and cypress knees bursting through clear black waters
and green algae soup, and on the warm bodies of animals
who do not need phones to know what we know,
all while gliding, that the swamp will provide.
Back at the car, my phone, and the buzz rings ugly.
I want to offer it to the alligator,
but that would be violent
to the alligator, who was only floating that day.
“They closed my park,” my sister interrupts.
“It’s the right thing,” says my nephew.
“That’s going too far,” says my brother.
What I do know is
I want to float that day. To be an hour in alligator’s skin
thick and coasting toward nothing, knowing through home what it needs:
the clean peat lungs of the wetlands, the sure lapis breath of Florida sky.
Suspension Bridge, Ravine Gardens State Park, Palatka, Florida, March 2020
Tourists come for inarticulate sunsets and fried sand against their calves.
Spring break forgetting slams slick-bodied against the deaths of others,
a drunken decree: do not bother me, I am young and free.
I am learning Florida, its fine sand only icing.
Visit, and the salt whisk of coastline lands wet and gentle on your face,
makes ethereal your life and carries you
home, light on a magic carpet of feldspar and quartz
where you live for weeks on memory and
stages of sunlight and water across the days.
What you know is balm, which is closed today.
I will learn Florida, where wetland greens ache clear down
through the gullets of tarpon, grouper, and the piscean bodies of us,
mining what can be found, if you do not mind being gutted for beauty.
We are the growing, with dendrites not yet ready for this world.
Knowing is in the bald cypress, in dogwoods and Southern magnolia,
in the palms and loblolly pines that fall
still standing down steephead ravines toward the forest floor,
holding in their aged arms the calamitous woodpeckers,
the agile flames of canaries and the veined skin of the blue flag iris.
It is in the alveoli of mangroves, their Sisyphean striving on bony,
ancient legs that scrub at our crimes against air.
It is in their foil: the laurel oaks, who crop-choke our lungs in spring
with lime-green, adamant pollen: they will survive.
Knowing is in the swampgrass and water lilies
low to the ground against the winds of hurricanes.
It is in death, the burning in our eyes,
and the thick walls of catastrophe-readied hearts, our penance.
We are suspended above the ravine, where clear springwater moves with silt-earth, gray which in all cases, complicates things. My daughter runs, carries her brave laugh over the soft bounce of bridge. My husband jumps, laughs, and rocks the wood façade of solid ground under our feet.
We scream, grab for the fluid guardrails that move across the world.
We still ourselves, then walk, sure again
of the slippery privilege to live in this world.
We are suspended, pretending life could float.
Walls
In bodies that hold it all, we make walls of clouds.
They float in a puzzle of neverminds.
I name the shapes. You grasp to pull them down,
feel cool mist before they retract.
Another tack, yours: the line of demarcation along my thigh.
This one can be walked, at least. It is the way you see.
The body, like a poem, is a stone
last on the path of mossy steps
behind the failed lines of prose,
point of launch for those who strive
for the wordless world beyond,
where borders at least, are clouds.
Mind you, clouds can be tricky. They float in pieces
somewhere akin to shields in the obstinate air.
Your rapt hands are, only yours. There is no other way to say it.
Outside, always, pressing coaxing along adductor walls,
mere skin allows what it can (more than one might think).
These are the lines and shapes that keep you out, let you in.
We will cross them one day, when the body is the wind.
What Children See, Banyan Trees, St. Pete
In the place where roots fall from the sky,
labyrinthine chords descend from what was,
making child-sized forests of dark and light.
Children leap through winding wood
peer through banyan veils
because seeing through roots is no big deal.
There is nothing to remember.
Even the teenagers small themselves to play,
climbing with limber bodies that still fit
in the adventures of trees.
We are the grown-ups, the watchers.
We may follow, when asked,
let youth find us along ancient
airborne roots, tickling our shoulders.
We may run through peals of wonder
at forests that rise and ground and
grow from the sky.
Or we do not. We demur.
We are the grown-ups
who claim not to fit
between worlds, anymore.
