I saw him at work;
When he would visit the mangal
With a ***** over his shoulder.
He rolled up his pant legs and walked
Through the tidal wash. Once he had picked a tree,
He hacked for three days to cut
The mud and the mangrove
Free from the surrounding forest.
He piloted his self-made island into the lagoon.
Shortly, he became mangrove crazy,
A disease he called Rhizophoria
In the notebook he had taken along.
With mud lobsters and tree for his only company,
Of course he had mangrove on the brain.
His life became an ellipsis—
The two centers were the tree and himself.
From tubular mangrove branches, propagules fattened,
And seeds nested inside them;
He would scribble notes with delirium as they fell
Plumply into the lagoon
And were pulled away by the warm current.
Each time the tree condensed its salt
Into a sacrificial leaf,
He would sadly add a tick
To the tally of the dead he kept in his book.
He once wrote:
‘The salt is burning my eyes.’
Late afternoons, with beer in our hands,
We would watch him from the beach,
Five hundred yards away.
Eventually, his mangrove island drifted ashore—
He lay by the suberic roots
With a crust of salt along his cheek.