Fata Morgana: Poems

Come This Far

Come This Far You write things down in your sleep you can’t remember when you wake up, casting off doubts like rowboats into low surf receding toward another saltwater nowhere on the way to leaving the poem behind. You wonder if form could be contagious, shaping the visible to the horizon where the sky drowns in your blues, your green unsettled waves scribble their signatures on white sand comprising millions of crushed quartz particles. Willets and black-headed laughing gulls skim the white and wrinkled pages for what waves left behind, the drowned-out names: polychaete worms, small clams, and snails. If we were standing on the beach to watch the Gulf roll out its jade and turquoise distance, I’d put a flag there for you: sea turtle, nurse shark fin, floating log of driftwood bobbing, something to break up the horizontal, break into song that interrupts the rush and hiss of tides on sand, water’s willingness to wander, to return. Several schools of rays fly underwater just offshore, mantas, perhaps, but much too small, what are they teaching today? The wind is a secret that tells itself, its heavy vowel clusters mumbling afternoon. We have come to the end of the body and the body doesn’t end, terns and 81 Shepherd PG:Layout 1 12/20/06 5:27 PM Page 81 brown pelicans break the surface concentration to dive for small fish. Local bays and bayous are almost swallowed up in dioxin, radium, runoff from the paper factory and toxic seepage from assorted Superfund sites. Perdido, Blackwater, Texar, and Grande still glister, what with the light locked in its present tense (today casts off its doubts like sand poured from white sneakers). Gulls salvage whatever they can find, pick at the remains of pronoun and place, never look light in the eye. We cannot get simpler colors (your eyes are blue with flecks of green, or gray mingled with blue), wouldn’t want that anyway. 82 Shepherd PG:Layout 1 12/20/06 5:27 PM Page 82 ...