And Yet Here’s Our Spring
A response to Wallace Stevens’ “Indian River”
When loggerheads and leatherbacks lumber onto our beaches,
the swallow-tailed kites return from those other Americas,
when the gators grow amorous, on the move,
when humidity laps up our afternoons
and the first thunderhead lies in wait on the horizon,
the wind chimes clatter with their own tunes.
No more gill nets drying on the docks of our rivers.
Commercial fishermen legislated into extinction.
Mangroves snowy with egrets
while mullet splash and circle in figure eights beneath
the palmetto-thick banks, and on the nursery beaches
nesting least terns and snowy plovers chitter incessantly.
• • •
Beach Reading
“Art should not compete with nature,” he says,
the Gulf at his back under an overcast sky,
storms three or four miles offshore,
pelicans diving for baitfish in the shallows.
No surging surf, the Gulf strokes the beach
as you would your cat or a small child.
He shuffles through his papers – poems –
sizing up his audience: the thirty-somethings
spreading out a green-plaid blanket
and unpacking their wicker picnic basket
of its gluten-free crackers, fresh pâté,
a light wine especially chosen for this occasion.
The matron, an art patron tough as a tern,
escorted to her beach chair, while a heavyset man
sinks deep into the soft sand. Over there,
high on the dune, must be the smoking section.
What he reads, you would read with the sun setting,
with the gulls soaking up the rhythms of the Gulf.
• • •
Stephen Reilly’s poems have appeared in Steel Toe Review, Wraparound South, Pretty Owl, Cape Rock, Main Street Rag and the Broad River Review, Poetry South, as well as in the anthology (edited by Jane Anderson Jones and Maurice O’Sullivan, Pineapple Press, Sarasota, Fla. 1995). He presently works as a staff writer for the Englewood Sun, a daily Florida newspaper.