Reading and writing in the right proportions of echoes.

Florida in January


The cold of winter is somehow colder here,
the trees bleaker, with their rags of Spanish moss,
the very air clipped and impatient.
You wouldn't realize summer's forest,
so much like New England, grew in a mattress of marsh
until the leaves were down . Beneath the second growth
a low fringe of starved palmettos
lives in short, childlike arcs, their palest greens
worn almost to the color of old dollar bills. 
In rye field and feed lots,
amid the swaying, wheezing cattle
lost to their mute philosophies,
stalk our self-important tourists, the sandhill cranes--
Nature's aristocrats, eye flared with red eye-shadow
(carelessly applied, as if without a mirror),
their jaunty icepick heads eager or greedy,
but their bodies delicately boned, like young ballerinas.
They high-step away in virginal unease.


Nothing repairs the indifference of their veering,
neither the storm casting its tattered cloak
over the sand pines, nor egrets huddled
against the lake's border, folded up like origami paper,
nor the water, sullen, pocked and greasy,
a rusting tintype of our latent democratic vistas,
Like Ovid on the Black Sea, the restless stranger
might feel such cruel beauty monotonous.
But, inshore, a crusty alligator steams,
nosing into reeds to let off passengers
or take on canvas sacks of mail,
as if the weather had never once been tender
or required, like love, a moment of surrender.