There’s no accompanying poem for this one, though its roots are in the bike path at Matheson Hammock. I have so many memories of that path over the years, from years in which I would cruise down it on my bike, no need to pedal, through the brackish high tide waters, to years after that, when you had to port your bike out because of the mass of dead seagrass at that one point before the parking lot, to the more recent years, when you just stop halfway, because that mass of dead seagrass is so big, and the waters are high so often. Matheson is one of the spots where you can really see the effects of sea level rise in our lifetime, and part of me misses what was, already. It’s going to be gone, and I am missing it in advance.
So this piece is about that funky, fetid, glorious mangrove smell, the way that path closes you in, the memory of clear waters over the path, shifting to ever more murky waters, and the title refers to the way mangroves are shifting North with climate change, which–as much as we love mangroves here–isn’t great for the habitats which aren’t used to them. Think of the floating pods, bobbing among blades of dead, floating seagrass (also a consequence of global heating), but remember that place as it was, too.