Voyage in the Everglades

The channel winds upon itself,
opal gleams overhung with greens,
and no line on the chart corresponds
to this long, ever more sinuous passage.
We are traveling a hairline creek
that mingles with a slurry of marl.
In this can-can and coincidence of being,
we never know when some other face,
flushed by our motion, will rise to meet us.
Unpredictable rhythms school us —
the splash of fish, the settling of wing —
refining our notions of plot and drama.
The radio crackles with questions
garbled from a distant craft:
"...something something edible?" is the question. 
"Yes, but something something..." is the answer. 
Solitude hums through a slew of mud rushes,
through stiff flags and root tangles caked
with a convolute of oysters.
A velvetseed bush brushes the boat.
Mute things shimmer in the slow red sun
as along the reeking shoal a white heron
hunts hypnotically: how is a creature
immaculate in a field of decay?
This long marshy peninsula is a cleansing,
ever unburdening itself in aquatic filters
and constancies of light,
in swamp-angels and swamp-gums
in bonefish and brackish nurseries —
its population all specifics for clarification: 
for minds no less than waters, and so deftly
that we know what has happened only
when we emerge from the glades
to the pancake houses and premiums,
to the rainbow of octanes. 

First published in Homage, 2024
Homage Travel Stories & Essays | Poems | Contents at-a-Glance