Raised along one, you understand things

about shores, how you come to believe in them, a glass

blade slipped between here and there, letting fall clearly

that side and its woods, the shadows you walk into without leaving,

while here the street names like roots through leafmold

make tributaries and trade routes across the map we call

mind; or there, it is a woods to escape through, and beyond,

a marshland of roads to a city, a city you enter by exiting

a shell left clinging to a reed along the bank, bending as the wind

bends it, and moves you into a life sensed waiting, its wings veined

with currents already coursing through you. Here, if a shore,

then somewhere to get to, a bridge suspended, that in another time

was a ferry to cross, the sun making spikes around a shade

that’s your reflection, while unmoved hands work the oars.

Or here, stretched out in the sun between two shallows

of unlit floor, the cat tips her eyes toward the light, two coins,

in this city built on bayous, those great shifters of runoff,

fast food bags, plastic bottles, and an oily froth that feeds

the ship channel, then tossed upon the gates to the dead zone

of the Gulf. You never see it, but 200,000vessels and barges

move 200million tons of cargoed want and need

through the port each year, the promise of another shore,

even as it’s only an edge without definition,

and even at its widest, the thinnest ink-stain of bird

or tree line lets you mark where the Mississippi ends,

not in water forever falling off the lip, the world unable

to exceed the squared-off pages of its atlas, even as it does.