McGrath - Seven Notebooks

Ocean like beaten metal removed from the cooling pail, mark of the hammer and tongs, the smiths signage, grain revealed as by pressure of the burin in a Japanese print, substantial, bodily, color of agave, color of bitter medicine, translucent only when the waves rise up to break at the bar, fingered by sun to the texture of meringue or Verano glass. Miami is not famous for its seashells. This beach, continually eroded, is held together by borrowed sand, graded by tractors at dawn, willed into place by the tourism industry. But today, after a weeklong barrage of northeast winds, it resembles the famous shell beds of Sanibel, though these are mostly bits and pieces arrayed in sinuous drifts, the frilled lips and spooned-out tails of horse and queen conchs, sponge tubes, varieties of seaweed and uprooted coral, tiny broken elkhorn infants, torn fans, punch cards, serrated disks and tribal ornaments, teeth, dismembered ears and bleached stone knuckles of a skeleton seeking restitution. And the eye, from its cupola of privilege, scanning the wreckage to seize upon the unbroken cylinder of an olive shell, paired lightning whelks revolving in the wash, purple scallop overwritten with calcified worm tunnels how does it know to seek out only perfect forms?

Breakfast: two clementines and a blueberry yogurt while reading Neruda on the porch.

The students are agitating for me to teach the Whitman & Neruda seminar, a class I have promised and failed to deliver for how many years now? Ode to Criticism. Ode to Eel Chowder. Read this week that blueberries have been determined to be a nutritional super food, a mighty antioxidant endowed with mysterious power to supercharge the brain and all but assure eternal life. Yes, but will they cure my aching feet? My policy is to ignore bodily afflictions for at least six months, but my days of running on the beach appear to be at an end. Temporarily, Id like to believe. I am a good patient, performing all the podiatrically prescribed exercises and therapeutic routinesice, stretching, a stupid boot I must wear to sleep like an antipodal dunce cap to passively stretch my plantar fascia, the tendonlike bundle of tissue that underlies the arch of the foot and bears upon it the bodys weight, anatomical detail of which I have resided in delightful ignorance heretofore.

As a rule, you notice the plantar fascia only when it cries out in pain. And then, if you continue to run on it, for weeks, and even months, I suppose you get what you deserve. Swimming is better anywayI should take a swim in the ocean! But school is in sessionthere is work to be done! Beautiful morning, sunny and cool, the archway hidden beneath cascading alamanda blossoms the color of Irish butter. No, I do not feel like working, or exercising: I feel like reading poetry. Ode to Laziness. Ode to Walt Whitman.

Still cannot grasp Neruda to my satisfaction. There is about him something of the conger eel, I believe. And something of the plantar fascia. And something of the blueberry.

Flocks of ibis on old tractors in cleared fields sliding to sawgrass, cartloads of corn, or mangoes, or clean fill dirt, orchards of citrus and avocado, shade houses of the enigmatic orchid growers,
dusty horses in a crude corral fashioned from cypress limbs where the canal is edged with sugarcane and banana trees by the freight tracks hard against the Casa de Jesus , convicts collecting trash along the roadside in their FLA CRIMINAL JUSTICE jumpsuits with the SHERRIFS DEPT school bus on the shoulder, joyless troopers overseeing what appears to be a collection of high school kids caught with bags of pot in the glove compartments of their Trans Ams,
security towers around the Krome Immigration Detention Center, razor-wire reefs on which the rough boats of the loas bound for Lavilokan have run aground, gravel quarry gouging the template, coral rock pits and barrows, panel truck offering shrimp and stone crab claws from the Keys, pickups selling roasted corn or watermelons, pickups heading into the fields loaded with campesinos, faces of the Maya picking pole beans in the Florida sunshine, Krome Avenue: the Third World starts here.

Midwinter, and we have come to pick strawberries and tomatoes, flowers and herbs, our annual nod to hunting and gathering, a voyage into the remnants of agricultural South Florida, vanishing order endangered as the legendary panther. Sure enough, Rainbow Farms has been swallowed by exurbia, and we must head farther south in search of a passable field, crossing the canals where anhinga hitch their wings to hang like swaths of drying fabric beside the dye vats on the rooftops of Marrakech, tree farms and nurseries on all sides, freeholds of the Old Floridians or ranchitos run by cronies of long-deposed caudillos, ranks of potted hibiscus and parti-colored bougainvillea, bromeliads, queen palms, Hawaiian dwarf ixora. When we finally find a strawberry field its late afternoon and many have given up, but there are still a few families in the rows, hunched abuelas with five-gallon buckets they will never fill today, and I wander out among them and lose myself altogether. The strawberries are not fully ripeit is the cusp of the seasonyet the field has been picked over; we have come too early, and too late. Lush, parsley-green, the plants spread their low stalks to flower like primitive daisies and I seek the telltale flash of red as I bend to part the dust-inoculated leaves, spooking the lazy honeybees, but mostly there is nothing, the berries are pale, fuzzed nubs. Of the rest whats left are the morbidly overripe, fly-ridden berries melted into purple froth and those just at the bursting brink of rotin the morning, if you bring them home, these will wear a blue-green fur, becoming themselves small farms, enterprising propagators of mold.

But heres one perfect, heart-shaped berry, and half a row later, three more, in the shadows, overlooked. Where has my family gone? Where is everybody? I find myself abandoned in the fields, illumined by shafts of sunlight through lavender clouds, bodiless, unmoored and entirely happy. White eggplant and yellow peppers colored lanterns of the Emperor! Lobular, chalk-red, weevil-scarred tomatoes a dozen errant moons of Neptune! Vidalia onions seized by their hair and lifted to free a friendly giantess from the soil! Snapdragons! They carry the intonation of Paris on a rainy day in May, granitic odor of pears, consensus of slate and watered silk. Elizabeth snips a dozen stems with flower shears scented by stalks of sage, rosemary, flowering basil, mint. From here the city is everything to the east, endlessly ramified tile-roofed subdivisions of houses and garden apartments, strip malls, highway interchanges, intransigent farmers holding their patchwork dirt together with melons and leaf lettucethe very next field has been harrowed and scoured and posted for salealready in our years here it has come this far, a tidal wave of human habitation, a monocultural bumper crop. And to the west is the Everglades, reduced and denuded but secure, for the historical moment, buffered and cosseted, left hand protecting what the right seeks to destroy.