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What can I say about leaving the country?
Can I recreate the coolness of white sand
sifting between your toes
like fine talc
or summons up the cold terror of being sucked from the solid
into the nether world of quicksand?
Forever shall I tell of low tide only,
tripping eyeless over alien backs
of horseshow crabs slithering in
mating,
and the sudden rediscovery--- how love ebbs out.
I could tell amazing stories---
how catfish
bed for their lives
and dolphins dance with skiffs,
how the shy nuzzle of mammoth manatee
left me senseless
in silt.
Or shall I tell of fossils and waterfalls?
of the Devil's Millhopper and house-eating sinks,
of
prehistoric sharks and shards and Choctaw
and arrowheads peppering the sand where scorpions slide?
I shall
tell of clouds and water babies
in air hung thick like curtains in a sauna.
I have heard the scarred one's johnboat
slapping the lake-blackened night,
flushing gators like panthers from eel grass
in this land of peepers and
coots,
this land of surprises bagged to the limit.
And stopping at dawn at Nanny's shack
to deliver
limp ducks for dressing,
lie down under a huge smattering of stars
to get up with sand fleas and chiggers.
Perhaps
I should tell of bahia soft and berry vines
of the sudden innocence of shark fins
past the second sandbar.
Let me tell you of eating gumbo, fresh harvest from the sea, of couter, frog, and gator tail
from tannic
creeks, of the smell of turpentine.
Walk beneath canopies of spreading live oaks
and bed down on cushions of pine
needles.
Listen to the counsel of jay birds and quail,
the whine of clouds of mosquitoes,
or watch armadillo
parade through palmetto.
Have you tasted crystalline violets
or eaten from diadems of dates?
Talk
to mockingbirds or caravans of robins.
Oh, come with me light and unafraid of
this land of water spiders.
Quicken
before meat-eating pitcher pants with
pale green picture windows, or deer tracks and owl spoor
and kingfisher's
nests above quaking banks of loam above limestone boils roiling up cold subterranean water
at a thousand gallons per
second. Dreams lie
deep within limestone and muscadine and cypress,
and our eyes are heavy with amethyst.
May our dreams be filled with such wonders.
May we never leave the country.
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