The End of Landscape
There's a certain sadness to this body of water
adjacent to the runway, its reeds and weeds,
handful of ducks, the water color
manmade. A still life. And still
life's a cold exercise in looking back,
back to Florida, craning my neck
like a sandhill crane in Alachua Basin.
As for the scrub oaks,
the hot wind in the leaves was language,
Spanish moss—dusky, parasitic—
an obsession: I wanted to live in it.
(One professor in exile did,
covered himself in the stuff as a joke—
then spent a week removing mites.) That's
enough. The fields of rushes lay filled
with water, and I said farewell,
my high ship an old, red Volvo DL,
gone to another coast, another peninsula,
one without sleep or amphibious music.
Tonight, in flight from San Francisco—
because everything is truer at a remove—
I watch the man I love watch
the turn of the Sacramento River, then Sacramento,
lit city of legislation and flat land.
I think of Florida, how flat.
I think of forgetting Florida.
And then the landscape grows black.
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Written on 2009
Submitted by Drone232 on April 28, 2022
Modified on March 05, 2023
- 1:01 min read
- 19 Views
Quick analysis:
Scheme | AXA BCX XXX DXX XXX XBE DFX XFX XEC |
---|---|
Closest metre | Iambic pentameter |
Characters | 1,027 |
Words | 202 |
Stanzas | 9 |
Stanza Lengths | 3, 3, 3, 3, 3, 3, 3, 3, 3 |
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"The End of Landscape" Poetry.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 8 Jun 2024. <https://www.poetry.com/poem/125711/the-end-of-landscape>.
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