(Ossabaw Island, GA, 2018) 

Corruption in Congress was getting to me.
Never mind the White House. Perspective 
was what I needed. I walked to the dock
in noon light, a clutch of cormorants
perched on wood pilings, a black mass
of outstretched wings reaching for the sun.
Killdeer cries in the mudflats. Red-billed
oyster-catchers skimming over the sanctuary.
Tripling the military budget? For what? 
They were already in Russia’s back pocket!
The cormorants looked nonplussed. They didn’t
care about some orange-haired, orange-skinned 
nut-job who was going to obliterate their world, 
and mine. They knew the moment was sweet, 
even if they wouldn’t say it, but sun on black
wings looked so soothing I said it 
for them. I wanted to know only what 
they knew, this moment… tide-ebb exposing 
the slick mud of the river emptying 
into this brackish channel. Salt stung 
my eyes. The salt marsh showed strange 
incongruities, mud-lumps, hollows, holes
bubbling with covert life, sea-lice, water-
bugs scriggling along the surface, the feel
of it, somehow, shaky, too much I couldn’t
track or interpret. The cormorants took it all in,
or didn’t, impossible to know what 
their red eyes, craning on snaky radar
necks, recorded. I recorded only what 
my senses sensed, what made sense
as a coherent set of intel. Old Roger
came puttering round the cove in his fishing
rig, a few old boys with him, MAGA caps
clamped to their heads. As they bumped
against the dock, I saw honey-colored bottles
of Maker’s Mark, that whiskey going down 
as smooth at noon as cocktail hour. The cormorants 
stirred a little, ruffling their wings – in salute, 
perhaps, or recognition. Were they all in it 
together? When the old-boys raised their tumblers 
of glowing amber to the sky, I wasn’t sure 
it was for me, the birds, or their leader. 
I gave a weak wave and watched the waves 
beyond their boat that seemed, under this strong sun, 
not waves at all but three-paneled triangles 
colluding to wash over this undefinable, 
moving thing we’d all agreed to call water 
and the wavering moment. Enough to trick 
us into thinking the world was solidly
what it was, and waves were waves, not 
momentary shapes shifting at the whim 
of whoever was in charge of perceiving. 
One moment, wind made the waves move and the day 
move along. The next, when wind stilled 
and cormorants’ black wings lost their luster, 
the individual feathers appeared more 
like black daggers, and the stillness 
at the center of the day terrified.