Mangroves
By Paul Cameron Brown
How do you survive
in the mangrove swamps -
amid the twitchings of fetid water
& water lice thick as baby tears?
How, with all the wallow of thick muck
making suction noises and the teams in relays
searching nightly with baited hounds, do you pull free?
Your bamboo pole knows every ploy
but is a slender craft ill-equipped
to sparring blows from every quarter,
the undergrowth necessitates.
The closeness of the clammy night
heaved about like so much rotting fruit will draw
the ants . . . devouring like that abundance of cold, yellow eyes -
the firefly swarms that mock your heavy steel machete arm.
Across the drift of darkness
and the insect life
you bat in swarms,
the ultimate danger is not in the cayman giant
or his reptilian cousin named of copper wire,
the Anaconda; or even mindless holes, thick black
ooze that throttles a victim . . . but the two legged form coming,
searching . . . a spectre on hind quarters with a bolo knife stepping
free of that beaded circle, the inner camp.