Florida
is shaped like a net,
mouth
open south of Georgia,
a
catch-all for highways and colliding
sea
breezes. Conundrum of sea cows,
north
flowing rivers, honey bell oranges,
love
bugs, eye wall winds. More lushly
appointed
than Oz’s Emerald City
for
those exiled of their rainbows.
Do
other peninsulas share the same problem:
being
a column that thinks it’s an island
that
thinks it’s a bridge between
sun
and ocean’s slow pink convergences?
Think
Italy, its fleecy fence line
of
sea, its centuries of conquerors.
Why
does the shore magnetize, incite, inspire
both
art and lunacy? Paradox, not paradise:
how
we claim what has already claimed us.
That
field of winter robins
will
follow the north star home.
The
sea shell at your ear,
a
buzzing hive of ocean. I feel
most
awake in the no wake zone—
coasting
slow enough to leave no trail.
Dragonfly
wing— an iridescent map
with
three sides of wind.
There
is no sky like the Florida sky—
its
Caribbean soul, wide and diverse
enough
to house mountain ranges
of
cumulus proportions, a humid
evolution
still visible in the night
beyond
the neon turnspit of theme parks,
sink
holes and rockets, the sphinx moth
fevered
in a furl of orchid spun like hot glass.
Right
now at our state lines, billboards
and
tides are swiping at the whims of
dreamers,
pirates, tourists, venturers, wayfarers,
whose
heel-scuffed ruby slippers spin
like
fuzzy dice from the rearview mirror.