The turtles are dry back when I am near silent. My kayak glides by. They stay in the sun careening their necks staring. Imaging what I look like to them, all that red, all that yellow, all that bashing. We forget at times that we are being witnessed while we witness. I can hear the wind when I am alone. For the first time I see the home blown away by Ian has left one window in the first floor so snakes and spiders can rise with the east and begin to rebuild nest and web. This heron points the way with sewing-needle beak on blue sky; we stare. Life chess. His heaving chest collecting air and sprung from dead pine. Buddy, the guardian Jack Russel of the old man in the sea is not telling me today that I am a storm arriving on his master’s doorstep only petals from his pink bougainvillea spill into the brown soup and twirl.
By now, late spring, when the clouds have returned and summer storms are practicing, the mangroves should be emerging to meet me with glowing effervescence, but they are not. People say Florida has no seasons. What better place to analogize with the poor war metaphors than here; pre-war, landfall, ground zero, reconstruction, the count…
The Sound was ravaged by Ian and anthropormography sliced into the mangroves like the planet’s warp and weft—a new quilt fraying in all dimensions and distortions. A woman found wrapped in mangroves months later. A catamaran sealing a home shut like carpentry. A loggerhead turtle decaying on the beach next to the decaying fender of a black Toyota Camry. And worse. And better.
I feel like I am not growing anymore. I saw the mangroves.
depending on their orientation
begin to restore themselves
to different degrees
I got a good look because I was in a kayak. Some mangroves were flush green at the bottom, and shocked up top. At other orientations to surge and wind side, mangroves were pointed like spears, broken at the hips, brown with crisp death. Others had one or two branches growing and that’s it. Still yet, others looked like a gnarl of hair knots—unable to unwind themselves from the hurricane wind.
I began to think of people, like these trees, total transference, I didn’t care about the myopic lens quite yet and I thought about what we had gone through and also what we could take, and I thought about what mangrove am I; not last year’s glowing abundance, not the dead warning spire. I thought about all the times I’ve been this way and I scream You aren’t growing yet! And Another storm is coming! And then I realized the rain has only just begun and the mangroves have to grow back one leaf at a time and there is so much building and happening that I can’t perceive. But regenerate happens with no will. I think only my arm has leaves.
Cole W. Williams is a poet, essayist, and hybrid writer. Forthcoming work is with Flyway: Journal of Writing & Environment, Canary, and Anti Heroin Chic. Williams recently won the Under Review’s annual chapbook contest for “The Pump” and was recognized by The Florida Review’s Humboldt Prize for the poem “Sunset.” Williams has attended the Bread Loaf Environmental Writers’ Conference, various writing residencies and will begin a Granta memoir class this fall.
