Tarpon Bayou

On the bayou, molded brick streets circle docks of wooden backbones stretched into black water, limbs sunk into seaweed now catchalls for rusty abandoned fish hooks from the "one that got away". Old cement plateaus boast of jazz band days when the water carried notes against the summer buzz Insects, air dancing with a thousand eyes, strung lights of pineapple gold glossed in evening ripples. You in my arms, swirling in the shadows, on the grass dance floor, no shoes, no socks and nothing spoken in haste. This was the beginning of life. The beginning of love. From this day forward, the bayou took note of our names Two of the many, unspoken, engraved on glass bottles, and sunk to the bottom of the black water, never to wander from home. In our deaths, these bottles will rise to the surface with puffs of stale air and the bayou will finally cut them loose, floating them out past the collapsing docks, past the first bloom of love and life, to sea.