Landfall

Landfall

(Harvey at Corpus Christi)

Launched from the center

of the sweaty swayback

of the dustbowl

driving to the sea

Texas is endless; brown, olive, bone

hills and beige flats,

griddle hot

a country of dead hours

of creosote bush and yucca

city sprawl, void and suburb eternal

before the silvered rim of Padre

shows hazy in the wave-trough,

a glint in the dead eye of

the Body of Christ.

How many times did we

drag the corpus of our

cross-nailed marriage over the plains,

one desert passing over another,

with what relief to leave that

four-wheeled cell

and feel a living air.

Then, bottle in hand, already lost,

you'd sit in your folding chair on a beach

 so bright and primeval all
such things, like us, were anachronisms.
The boy would run from the war

to the waves, freed and blazing delight

to slip into a salty blue singing that

drowned the sound of failure.

I'd walk up and down, in

and out of the surf, gripping shells'

nacred lifelines, finding a washing of watery
peace, transitory and recurrent

as the sky-swallowing

shadows of gulls cawking above.

I had no god then, and none

tonight,
yet I pray for that country

as the vast weeping Eye crawls across it 

with death and rage in its tears,
spilling blood or toy refineries

to soil and poison that white beach

where grace so waywardly hides 

giving her kiss to all flawed things.

~August 26, 2017

Optional Musical Accompaniment

 

Photos © joyannjones  Corpus, Gull Shadows, circa 1986