Shallow water and soil,
the mudflats you make are
littered with dead fowl.
The Laysan Albatross
could not survive,
desperate to get home
to its mate, stopping
through the Pacific
flyway to gather
vegetation, flora
soaked in a green
tongue. The salinity
of your sink poisoned
the oil of its stomach.
Its woeful mooing
could be heard by
the town eccentrics,
a noise they have heard
before. But you are
an accident: the
marshes, the mudpots,
the mesquite thickets
that dawdle around
your shore, the depression
you inhabit along
the San Andreas Fault;
industrial discharge,
blood water let from
the arm of the Colorado
rush. You wait for
summer to come and
evaporate, erase all
your failures:
the asphyxiated fish,
and skeletons of the
aviary; the poor Albatross
who laid eggs in vain
along the line of your
fetid water. It’s as if
we’re supposed to
think it’s beautiful;
to find an ironic grace
in the stalwart
insistence of your
cyclical presence.
But the casualties
you cough up, they
rise to the blub like
reverse phoenixes.
And that man who
cooks up his chemicals,
keeping to his cabin
on wheels as gas wafts
from his window;
he stays within
your proximity,
coming out at midnight
to look at it, the reflected
monocle of your body;
so still, you look
almost common in
half-lit darkness.
So if not beauty in
the dizzy clamp of his
eyes, then perhaps
an absolution,
a freeing, like
moonfire dancing on a
silver spoon.
Katherine MacCue is a graduate of the George Washington University. Her poetry has been published in RiverLit, Stone Highway Review, and she has forthcoming work in The Writing Disorder. She can be found at http://kvmacc.blogspot.com.
