Poison falls from the sky.
It is not rain but it is like rain,
sent down in a mist from airplanes
flying as low and determined
as ospreys looking for breakfast.
Poison falls from the sky.
It is not rain but it is in the rain
hitting the shaved wicks
of the gumbo limbo and the wax
of fetterbush and bitterwood,
canoeing down elliptic tips unless
it is drought, when the leaves
will gutter what they need for longer.
Poison falls from the sky.
It is millions of missiles unleashed
when the sun is poking up
like a fresh shoot of turtle grass
or dehydrating the horizon, aimed
at the insects carrying blood
diseases that harm the human
unborn, the not-yet-conceived,
the maybe-one-day, the just-in-case,
though plumage can be worn
to prevent a proboscis stick,
and no venom is dropped
to stop what is purely recreational.
Poison falls from the sky
to kill the food that is eaten
by the fish who will be targeted
by bigger fish and who will become
meals for humans worried about
their unborn, the not-yet-conceived,
the maybe-one-day, the just-in-case,
who continue to have sex
without prophylactic inhibitions,
and this poison rusts the chain,
it puddles, it runs off in the river,
intensifying with the tide,
and collects in the bodies of water,
the borrow holes where gravel
was stolen to build yards and roads
where only tracks of bear,
key deer and panther once were,
the solution holes formed
by the tannic dissolution of limestone
bedrock, where alligators might find
a vacation home in the dry
winter season, the ponds as dark
as immorality, where the wading
birds snap at whatever touches them
with reflexes faster than any proverbial cat.
Poison falls from the sky
into these bodies of water, which become
the still-pool embodiments
of death, of too many bodies who drink it,
who swim in it, who call it “natural
habitat.” Poison falls from the sky
and is taken back up by the ever-present
heat ironing the hammocks, forming
clouds that every late afternoon grow
too pregnant with their earthly cargo,
and punctuate the blue with a rage
that breaches, that can never be
too loudly or righteously expressed,
that must always, somehow, be borne.
