Offshore
After Kit Kelen/After Ed Wright
Who were
they,
the people
who loved
that wide
green country,
underwater
now
a long time?
The far far ice
unfurling
its long slow
banners of
wash and wake?
Pouring the
coast’s broad
forested
band into an untimid
ocean,
tipping those
remembered
places under glass,
into
undertow?
The sky-wide rivers’
broad and salty
mouths flushed open
testing how the time, so thick
and covering
here,
rocks and
eddies about, here,
and here.
Past there, west
somewhere,
the moving water’s
flanked by
sandstone walls and
dips through
shade
into a
narrowing valley.
How long
did the
trees take on their long
die-off,
salt-poisoned, even as
they still
stood on the sloshing tongue,
that slow
tsunami, & who
watched over
their old land
from
receding coasts, not even
beach yet,
let alone beach
the thing we
make it, but
the bitter
refuge of high ground
as it slowly
islanded out,
the snaking waves
making a new sound
to sing this
place,
spilling
darkening light
over the
places of the old
songs.
Was there time enough
for the relict mangroves to
up their
fingery roots, before they
were shushed under
with curls of brittle breakers?
