Earth Lights

Out Snowhill Road, they say –

people see things.

Balls of floating light, swinging through the steam and heat of the swamp,



low to the ground—delusions of moonshine or rot or something.



University boys come out with sensors and gages and find—science and theories.

Methane pouring out of the muck, swamp gas, luminescence,

an unknown chemical alchemy in the decay of leaf mold.

Other people laugh and talk about seeing things in their own living rooms

(if they’d been out drinking with those boys.)



Down under bridge 213, on Snowhill Road, the Little-Big Econ drifts

its way to the big saw grass,

through cypress trees that stand knee to knee, a wet ribbon stained by tannic acid,

the color of old blood.

A river thick and sluggish as a winter moccasin, on its tired slide to the sea.





Spring heat brings mists from the ground, and fogs from the sky,

The air sits like clotted cream, churning distortion of light.

Live oaks reach up through the boil, ghost bones for limbs—from the bridge

a hint of perspective.

The old cypress trees wear Conquistador beards, a gray drape of Spanish moss,

standing lone watch, spirits of murdered Alaqua trapped inside their tight and silent bark.

Our dogs drag human teeth and shards of pottery up from the Indian mounds and graves along the Econ.



Some haunting goes on here, surely.

High school kids drive out to look for phantom lights or something.

Beer bottles flung into the smother of fog, glass plinking as it rains down

through the palm fronds, sing like disembodied wind chimes. The girl’s screaming, reverberates, coming from everywhere and nowhere, and the boys cling, pretending

fear is nothing. They hope to find their hands full of another kind of heat.

They cling, trying to fool even themselves.



Of this breathless place, there is talk of a witch’s coven,

a bloody traffic accident, a dead bride, a lynched black boy.

More than enough myth to bring on the benediction of hell,

a place where the earth’s skin is thin and those long-dead give up their teeth easily.