John C Gonzalez, Turquoise and Red on Black, 2023 (Artist Website)
Acrylic on panel, 3-color all over
On a small bridge over a fake canal,
I looked upon a model island covered
in long, Floridian grasses. A great blue heron
with its bead of an eye staring out
over the blades stood, gray head feathers
a little oily, wild. Cheap hotel, cheap lagoon,
down-on-its-luck bird, and me alone
with my conference badge blowing around my neck
on its royal blue lanyard. I wished us
on the beach, far from the Pizza Hut to-go shack
behind us in its nest of palms. Or rather,
I wished me away. How could I speak for a bird
awaiting tourist trash? Or maybe I looked
at the bird and saw myself: stranded,
in need of a bath, wondering what possessed her
to land in St. Petersburg where the air
is a weighted blanket. Maybe some places
are just better than others; unmasked,
they don’t ask you to entertain illusions.
For example, I was paddling on the Chesapeake,
a late afternoon spotting turtles sunning
themselves near the shore, and, would you believe it,
a heron, who’d stood at the edge of the water,
spooked and took off, her feathers like slate blue fabric,
the sound of her flapping wings a heavy whoosh
carried back to my canoe. I watched her
long body slipping low along the current.
Her eyes searching the water, the arum
or cordgrass, calculating the depths
of fish beneath the water’s salt and murk.
What fish? Which muddy beach? I can’t say I remember.
In that way, I suppose it’s an illusion, too:
steering to shore, my flip-flops squelching clouds
from the marsh bottom as we drag the boats in.
He catalogs turtles seen, I scratch mosquito bites,
and the evening spins out as we believe them to.