Terra Pericolosa

To map the consequences of regardless, of underestimate,

Of feverish faith, of the mechanical modernism of your false terrain. As if

Port Sulphur remained nominal, its slick globules merely figurative

Between territories of wait and wetlands of trust.

To etch the shallow-water horizon— a techno-utopian tribute

To shrimp estuaries, bird rookeries, oyster bays,

To tube worms & sea turtles. To watercolor these pelican grasses,

Oxidized, unapologetic executive marshes, roseated spoonbills.

For you who longed to smear concentric circles,

To have trusted you with longitude and latitude,

To blur this sargassum border between mourning,

Fighting, and willful denying of objects and subjects. As if

Generations of fishermen, scaling orders of magnitude,

Navigated oily streaks of miles in a legend of inches,

Skeletal, ghostly swarms of now-opaque, milky jellyfish. As if

to bury the blowout, rescind the rig. To fortify, to intone.

If naming were not violence, to witness an active verb:

Top kill, junk shot, top hat, dance dance revolution.

These wayward scripts a frontier province palimpsest.

Offshore yet another beacon, another account. Explosive violet iridescent.

Source: PoetryNow (2018)