Mangroves

    How do you survive
    in the mangrove swamps -
    amid the twitchings of fetid water
    & water lice thick as baby tears?

    How, with all the wallow of thick muck
    making suction noises and the teams in relays
    searching nightly with baited hounds, do you pull free?

    Your bamboo pole knows every ploy
    but is a slender craft ill-equipped
    to sparring blows from every quarter,
    the undergrowth necessitates.

    The closeness of the clammy night
    heaved about like so much rotting fruit will draw
    the ants . . . devouring like that abundance of cold, yellow eyes -
    the firefly swarms that mock your heavy steel machete arm.

    Across the drift of darkness
    and the insect life
    you bat in swarms,
    the ultimate danger is not in the cayman giant
    or his reptilian cousin named of copper wire,
    the Anaconda; or even mindless holes, thick black
    ooze that throttles a victim . . . but the two legged form coming,
    searching . . . a spectre on hind quarters with a bolo knife stepping
    free of that beaded circle, the inner camp.