“Ain’t that America,” the song unreels in my ear as I cast my gaze across waters John Smith surveyed. The twilight gleams off loading docks piled high with mountain tops of coal and aircraft carriers stand ready to sortie out to sea. Where cargo ships now super-sized, chocked with crates like building blocks await the rapture of cranes, trains and trucks to carry them, as Lionel would have wanted, to big box heaven. And the landfill turned golf course holds back its horde of trashed Zenith TVs until the next storm when it will drop them one by one, set by set, into the river like that fizzy b-roll from the Alka Seltzer ad, promising to cure what ails us after we’ve had way too much.
The white egret stands
unmoved by our plastic bags
tangled in marsh grass.
