Anhinga

Up north, ice is braced to break all quickness.
The leaves quiver down
and all across the grass browns;
trout pale in the streams,
sink to pool-bottom deep and hold,
hold deep in the cold current seam,
and wait, sleep and wait, for thaw, for spring,
for winter’s waste-white to be gone.

The eastern cottontails fatten.
The hares are dull with the blank season,
the nothing, nothing, everywhere nothing;
even trees stop pumping sap.
The trout lily and fleabane, the bull thistle,
the whorled loosestrife and mayapple,
the swamp candles will burn out;
look south now for the marsh wren.

The birds have fluttered south.
The ruby-throated hummingbird harbors in Panama,
the sandpiper skirts the Surinam coast
to winter in Tierra del Fuego,
the palm warbler absconds the Carolina bogs,
flown down here where the palms grow;
they grow, sway and shake in the sun
like Pentecostals speaking in tongues.

In this morning’s heat the water lilies
blossomed and the pond’s anhinga hung
on the leafless branches of a drowned tree
to dry its waterlogged wings in the sun.


The North End of Indian River

The summer’s torpor anvils George’s Flat.
The sun barely filters through the overcast;
its light grinds seeing like a granite slate.
The heat urges rot from the widgeon grass
stranded in mud divulged by two week’s wind
out of the bleak North driving the river back.

I struggle as I wade the flat’s mud.
A mud ray ripples in the wake of my trudge,
lackadaisically culling the clouds of sludge.
In my toil to water just deep enough
for a tailing red or gator trout, the
sweat alone is about all I can lug.

I turn to the fatality of a shoreline,
a crawling russet tangle entwined
with beer cans, shredded life vests, fishing line
knotting dead horseshoe crabs. In the tombstone light
they caress decay with their final mates,
the meat of their passion marbled with flies.

A tree bleached by time beyond recognition
mangles from the shore’s entropy, skeletons
the horizon. A turkey buzzard blackens
the driftwood branches. Cut in the mountain
of cloud cover. Unmoving. Immovable. But
the water moves. Inches of it womb warm.

Might be baitfish, or a slim haloing.
Maybe a catfish nose-down and rooting.
Might be a mullet, neurotic, rattling
or an eight-pound trout afternoon-napping.
Might be a red pushing wake for ghost crabs.
Might be the drab humidity feathering.

I hurl my cast at the abysmal shade;
like a question mark it loops away.
the sky is a cataract and day shreds
like a dropped, broken necklace. Jewels spray;
splintered trinkets slice blind across my eyes
across my scarred eyes again and always.


Mosquito Lagoon

We’re so skinny not even the Hell’s Bay
can’t float it, so we’re knee deep in the mud
pulling, pushing, lifting, scraping, slaving
the boat back to the slightly deeper stuff;

Here, even an inch can matter.
Out of the corner of my sight I snatch
a wisp: a tailing red pushing water.
Don says, “You’re a rock star if you can catch

him.” Of course I flub the cast, heart shocked,
knees quaked, and too damn close to load the rod.
The red’s spook sounds like a bowling ball dropped.
Don sighs, says, “Damn; that was a nice red.”

I feel sick with draining adrenaline,
even though I’ve caught reds and trout all day
long. But nothing remotely that clean,
close enough to see the false eye sway.

That night on the back porch with tall whiskeys
Don says, cigar smoke swirling his face,
“Jeremi, I’ve caught every fish swims the seas,
but only tailing reds make my heart race;

see ‘em, make the cast, watch the take;
ain’t nuthin’ better.” I’m hard pressed to disagree
but there was also dawn’s sherbert wake
and the goosebumps as we planed off in the breeze.