My new novel, Telephone of the Tree, comes out on May 7. Click here for more information. 

A few days ago, my family and I rented kayaks in the Florida Panhandle and paddled up and down the Wakulla River. We saw manatees and giant turtles. Alligators and herons. Anhingas and swift schools of fish. Ancient cypress keeping watch along the banks of the rivers, their roots like enormous toes gripping the sand.

I’ve loved manatees since I first saw them in my early twenties, on the intracoastal waterway. They feel like harbingers of another time, another world, in which the only goal is to be at peace in the water. At one point in the afternoon I floated right over an enormous manatee longer than my kayak. I held my paddle in the air and stayed silent, hoping not to disturb it.

Forces, by Albert Goldbarth

It’s different for the spiderweb: 
the only architecture 
in a five-block radius not 
undone by yesterday’s tornado. 

Out at the More-4-Less, strands 
of uncooked spaghetti were driven, 
unbroken, like nails, through concrete. 
Different levels: different forces. 

I remember when Anna told me 
about the deep-sea dive that almost 
killed her, hammered and disoriented 
and tossed like debris in the middle 

of two converging vectors of power. 
That’s what she said. The whales 
only knew they were singing 
to each other. 

Click here for more information on Albert Goldbarth. I’m unable to find where today’s poem was first published – my apologies.

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