Crossing Alligator Alley: The Everglades at Dusk (Poem)

The following poem was first published in 1983 in Kalliope: a journal of women's art (Vol. 5, No. 3), produced by the Kalliope Poetry and Fiction Collectives, Center for Continuing Education of Women, Florida Junior College at Jacksonville (Fla.) A publisher of literature and art for some two decades, Kalliope suspended publication in 2008.

   Crossing Alligator Alley:

   The Everglades at Dusk

It is land fit for nothing

but beauty.

And you pay to cross it.

Flat-green palmetto grows

a stubby quilt of fans.

Sawgrass stiffens,

erects itself like a spine

mastered in ballet class.

Gray as bone Spanish moss
hangs limp, reminding you
how a man
holds his head in shame.

Brittle-trunked, the Australian pine
(skyscraper of shade) intrudes
worse than a visitor on Sunday.

It's the heat urges you on,
and the concrete sweating
like a broken blister.

You realize lazy storms
don't happen this far south.
Only water moves at a dying pitch,
grown sick in the setting sun.

Where this place starves
of habit, the wind breaks
of song.

The silence stalls.

Danger waits conspicuous,
makes do with quiet repetition.

But secrets are no big deal here.

    Vultures moody-beaked and smooth of face
    track events with a vengeance.

Copyright 1983-2009 Maureen E. Doallas
All Rights Reserved.