Chesapeake

Chesapeake sustainability threatened

complexity
is your beauty
simplicity
your mystery
interdependence
sustains you

once upon a time
we dipped bowls
into your waters
and brought up
draughts of life

now
Skipjacks go
fathoms deep
into endless
depletion

charting
entangled
dead zones
broadening
into a sea of
inertness

your delicate
eco-essence tips
toward oblivion

effluvial farmers
layer mechanized
blankets of
nitrates on your
sunset shores
weaving
green tendrils
of algae blooms
strangling the
entanglements
of all links in
your miraculous
food chain

the EPA
proscribes
a Jenny Craig
pollution diet
to halt the
slaughter in
oxygen
challenged
dead zones
where Rockfish
are garroted,
oysters get fucked
by screwworms
and azure tinted
soft shell crabs
dance tepid
shoe taps
lifting a tinny
chorus of sad
Piedmont Blues

the flat-lining
watersheds
voiceless
warnings
tremble
rocking the
purged nests of
screaming ospreys
in vocal protest
of a sinking
Tangier Isle
anointing it’s
tombstones
of unvisited
cemeteries with
multicolored
guano

fitting
alkaline
tributes
to the lost
inhabitants
and forgotten
languages
sinking into the
brine of gray
brackish tides

Delmarva’s fine
intra-continental
balance skewed
by the oozing
industrial swill
of Frank Perdue
chicken farms
ruling the roost of
sanctioned sustainability
tinging clear watersheds
of finger lakes
set in splints to
repair dislocations
and complex
compound fractures
that may never heal
again

Music Selection:
Taj Mahal: Fishin Blues

jbm
Oakland
6/7/12

Reviews

[r. f. jordan]

you are essence, sir, as always. never am i as gripped with the pervasive possibility of imminent nothingness as in when i read your voice. yet within it all is this idea that the voice wouldn't bother to speak, if not for the hope that something, somehow, can be done about it all. breathless work of the highest order.