Decreation
We
must be rooted in the absence of a place.
—Simone
Weil
1.
On this fork of sandbagged and bunkered beach,
plumes of oyster
grass attend open water,
and oilrigs blot the horizon. Between
every two, one slightly smaller fades, more distant,
a pen stroke blending
heaven and the gray
Gulf of Earth. Mercurial tides contend
with offshore wind, turn deep charcoal, and recede.
Pink clouds drift awkwardly like erasures.
A hand’s width above the waves, a pelican,
plumb with mullet below,
defies these signs.
Trawlers lift their wings in egress: white-
bellied crabs, handfuls of marsh pulled apart
and falling, like rewinding
light, into
the wide mouth of an early dusk.
A driven reed blown back into the sand,
into the rough roots and gray-black surf.
2.
Up the bayou, past smoldering cane fields
burnt to their elements is
a crossing where
tankers drag three engines backwards
down the tracks—the wheels, groaning objections,
move where they don’t
want to go—Union
Pacific, Equity—past the citadel of the refinery,
a dim orange in Convent’s eternal flame.
Rusty points of cypress waver in the foreground.
3.
From the sky the marsh rises like moldy velour,
like swatches of work
shirts and dungarees
floating in an oil-slicked wash. Light poles
march off into water. Lakes takeover
lakes and scant arpents in
between. Pastures,
ant mounds and crawfish holes foam green
on the Gulf’s surface,
like thick lather around a bathing body.
4.
The fishermen anchor at Leeville’s sunken graves,
cast their lures among
broken crypts
that stagger down the shoal like
brass-plated divers. Cement crosses shoulder
waves and wide-mouthed
roofs pull in
a continuous salt spray.
As if the dead were neither dead nor living,
the living land speckled trout among their empty tombs.
If I could dive headlong into the brackish
water, a pelican after
a fish. If I could forget the sand, this wax
myrtle, before they fold back behind
the doors of the water,
behind the forest
primeval, the shrouded oaks
watching from their ridge. Empty as coat stands.
Orange and lemon groves sting the air thick with oils.
5.
I floated above the priest’s head and sat
on the marble cornice of a
fat Roman
column in the nave of Sacred Heart.
Like rain on pavement all over the world,
we were gray, but stone
gray, immovable,
unlike the spongy swamp beneath our feet. And hand bells
cut like filament, just as translucent
and magical. Tie fishing line to anything,
tug on it, and things move at your command.
Corpus Christi. One flesh, but two spirits
churning like magnets. We cannot have
what we most want because wanting itself holds us back,
longing occupies the space
of our being,
the oceanic space before we were cut free.
The cord itself is a vapor from the sea.
A previous tenant’s portrait hanging in the hall.
6.
If only I could give the land my body—
Dig, and water fills the
pit,
not even a foothold before it brims.
Someone will lay a plaster vault for me to ride,
like long boxes children
pull down flooded roads.
In my plaster boat I’ll ride Gulf shores
till I vanish like a rig in the sun.
If only the land would take me now,
I would lie against the marsh grass and sink,
muck enfolding me, welcome
the eroding Gulf—
handful by handful, carrying us away.
Who could have known how much the land wants the water,
to be the water, to forget?
We carve
and sign and plaster our impressions.
But then there will be no names, no
fierce grip of the undertow along the pier
or hiss of barnacles’ anxious breathing.
I’ll imagine us seated
at a crab boil,
potatoes and onions steaming, orange
and blue crabs over orange and blue propane,
another Friday in Lent,
newspaper and lemon
halves, cayenne stinging our nail beds. See,
a fog rests over the marshland, everything
water, nothing outside grace and gray chaos.
Reprinted from The Dirty Side of the
Storm: Poems by Martha Serpas.
Copyright (c) 2007 by Martha Serpas. With permission of the
publisher, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.