Two Poems

Notes Toward the Great Floridian Novel I
 
Ruth dusted the taxidermy alligator
where it stood menacing the front window
of her mother’s tourist trap shop in Alachua.
Behind the gator hung Hawaiian shirts,
other gators’ claws made into backscratchers,
and American flag glass breakers
in the event of a car crash. Say your truck
 
goes over the guardrail and into a lake,
all the duckweed and algae clinging
like so much shadow given body,
given need. Though that assumes
the impact doesn’t knock you out
thinks Ruth as she straightens snow globes
holding surfing Santas and sunbathing
manatees, the so-called snow
dyed yellow to resemble, what,
a sandstorm when you shake it?
We don’t have those here, then Ruth
 
is remembering how the dust of the dirt
driveway stayed suspended in the air
a long time after her father’s truck
pulled out of the yard for good.
He moved to Chokoloskee,
took rich men and their kids on fishing trips
in the Ten Thousand Islands. Ruth and her father
camped there once, drove the old camper
as far as random road would go,
found themselves on an open shoreline
in Hells Bay. Ruth stayed up all night
listening to her father’s snoring,
listening to the great insectoid heart
of Florida beating all around them,
bearing down, pressing up
even from the ground, it seemed
that loud and immediate and concrete
 
and unchangeable. But what did that matter
anymore? Her father belonged
to that beautiful biting noise.
She belonged to these boxes of tchotchkes
which her mother ordered from factories
north of the Florida-Georgia border.
And they would sell, of course.
All their customers an elsewhere,
she knew them only for the road
 
they came in on, the road she watched
from her window every night, rolling away
from the store’s bleach-clean skulls
and seashell chandeliers.
 

***

 Notes Toward the Great Floridian Novel II
 
He wakes in the stolen jon boat
in the Ten Thousand Islands,
with the shade of mangroves
and three hermit crabs on his chest.
The plastic bag of cash floats at his feet
in a puddle of brackish water.
Why call them hermits if they can stand
other crabs, he thinks. Then he thinks
maybe there’s enough gas in the tank
to carry the johnboat up the coast.
He could travel under cover of night.
If the moon is strong enough,
he can probably avoid colliding
with a piling in the dark
like his uncle did years back,
sank a rented pontoon in the channel
after too many snow cone margaritas
at the floating bar. Wasn’t his body found
upside down in the mangroves
with one eye missing from the pinfish?
It would be a hard thing to get out
of the county with so much cash.
And already the local police circulating
flyers with his face on them.
Only it wasn’t him. It was a child
he used to be, a photograph taken
on a prom night years prior,
his smiling date cropped out. Which heroin
had done anyway, in a van
parked behind the bowling alley
where they’d played skee ball for hours
for free. Because he’d broken
the machine. Because she didn’t want
the game to end. The van belonged
to her older sister, the cash belonged
to the bowling alley. He belonged
to the johnboat, it would take him
far from Chokoloskee. Which now,
for the first time, changed its mind
about wanting him to stay.
He closes his eyes and sees the tenderness
of his mother’s filet knife
excising pin bones from seatrout,
the heavy saline scent
of their bodies on the kitchen counter.
He sees his father smoking by the canal,
the water carrying those ashes everywhere.