(Located in the mouth of the Little Manatee River,
they extend southward along the shore of Tampa Bay).

At first, a fish, darting and feeding in the roots of the red mangrove.
Night, under a sky and watery moon, in the place of ebb and flow,
high tide in the brackish juncture of sea and river. No longer content
in this woody web, this protective net and filigree that keeps the earth
from collapsing into brine, I became a fiddler crab skittering
beneath the branching canopy of the black mangrove through sunrise
and sunset, sea and river rise and retreat, composing and decomposing.

I stood in driving rain, a young man, no longer fish or crab,
homeless, having arrived on slightly higher ground. Later
I slept, head resting on the curves of the white mangrove, not belonging
among the mosquitos. I was no brother to seagrass, not a thing with feathers
come to give birth to my young, rather a refugee, adrift, driven mad,
come to rest in these roots pretending they were my own.

When cold settled here and stayed too long with relentless hurricanes,
the swirl of herbicides and human waste, the parasites and the oil ooze,
the shallow roots loosened, the walking trees sat down, reclined,
and the tides had their way. Only spirit, memory and wind remained.
The manatees, no longer mermaids, the brown pelican nests held no eggs.
The red snapper and the loggerhead turtles did not retreat
into the coral reef or the gators and the moon jellyfish
into the seagrass beds. Snakes no longer hissed and slithered.
There were no more gardens, Eden had disappeared.