Migration Shift
Their calls announcing winter came first,
drawing neighbors to doorways and drivers to slow
for the spectacle of a black and white aurora,
20,000 sleek bodies streaming across the midday sky.
They asked for an audience, a standstill, a chance
to slow and control time.
They drew a sheet over the sky in waves,
tsunamis of feather and squawk set to break
against the shores of Bombay Hook,
marshy heart of the Atlantic Highway, gem
in a diadem of wild touchstones for wintering waterfowl.
Snow geese enjoy the Delaware coast
and her wide farm hips flared with winter wheat.
They’re disappointed each year to return
and find another farm turned to spade and box,
their feasts a bulldozed memory.
When 1,000-fold more fowl
than your grandfather ever saw,
born from overprotection and crop glut,
come calling with 1 million ravenous mouths
ready to turn salt marsh to mud flat
and strip your field bare in two days —
plant radishes instead of wheat.
Their flocks thin the next year.
The salt grass still sways in the thin sunlight.
Neighbors stand in their doorways
looking at the blue sky, wondering,
Where have the trumpets of winter gone?
They whisper, They’re coming later this year.
It must be the warming.
The farmer sets her alarm back a few hours.
She can finally sleep.
Cassiopeia
They called me vain. Boastful.
As if they couldn’t see the stardust
sparkling under my skin.
Creamy phosphorus,
sparkling magnesium,
silver potassium,
the glossy sheen of carbon —
a whole galaxy of potential.
It’s there in the white of my eyes,
in my daughter’s lean arms
miraculous as moringa trees.
They called me vain for seeing
the stars in our blood, as if those
pale sea nymphs fawning over sailors
and never drinking the sun
could rival us. We are queens.
These minor gods and their precious feelings,
hurt to learn that we women have more
strength than they’ll ever know.
What good are men? A vain god to terrorize
a daughter to spite her mother.
A father to sacrifice her. A husband
to abduct her, to save her,
the blood of another woman
still staining his hands. He’ll devour her
before the monster can. And after all
this punishment for not knowing my place
in the order of gods, I am to be cast
into the sky chained to my throne,
unable to hold my daughter
left just out of reach?
No, we can only trust the moon, the one
goddess those sea gods and sailors bow to.
She sits with me as I plunge into the water
each night, helping blot out my humiliation.
But the vain god is a fool, because none
believe it’s in vain to look upon me now.
I am a queen and my throne sits
on the luminous arm of the galaxy.
To gaze at the heavens is to see me.
I am the sky, and women know
that means I am God.
The stardust in my skin will not die.
Each supernova seeds
a new generation of stars
and elements,
and I have two burning inside me.
You’ve seen them with your own eyes.
Come closer. See?
I’ll break these chains yet.
Sussex County
Buoyant: You first learn to swim floating in the West Bay, your mother’s hand along your spine telling you to arch your belly at the clouds, your feet afraid of touching muck bottom where razor clams and crabs wait to slice your wrinkled feet. Your parents throw you into the ocean at the fishing beach, tell you to acclimatize your eyes to salt, absorb its sting but avoid jellyfish and your father’s baited line. Crushing waves teach you to hold our breath, and your father and youpractice in tunnels under Baltimore, as you pass graveyards, 30 seconds, don’t breathe, 60, don’t, 90, don’t breathe until you must. This practice prevents drownings when you’re six, eight, ten. Odd numbers are lucky so you count out the wake of your papa’s boat in sets of three, dive for rings in the campground pool in sets of five. You decide to become a lifeguard so you can swim laps on lunch breaks, holding your breath the whole length of the water.
Marsh: You’ve never met mud you didn’t love, once you got past the smell. Rich tidal flat at daybreak, when the water is low and the reeds wilted. Mud bubbles with thousands of holes where bivalves pucker their exhalations. The sand is sighing, singing, sucking down forgotten seeds carried on the wind. The Lewes canal is hot and dry at low tide, and the fish languor in the cool mud, refuse to bite. Horseflies nip instead. You place your crab pots as close to the grass as your boat will allow, pray not to suck mud into the motor by Love Creek, pole into the soft bottom to gauge depth. You lie on the sandbar under the fishing pier, fingers clutched around
tumbled sea glass, and dream of mud in brackish harmonies.
Migratory: Straight lines down Route 1 South and 50 East deliver you on biannual cycles to your childhood home, the marshland, stomping grounds for millions of migratory birds: egrets, herons and ibis, Canadian geese and sea ducks. Out in the bay, spy unguarded osprey nests scouted by bald eagles, carnivores with wingspans longer than your father, eager for tender spring eggs. In May, seagulls peck and jostle for the wriggling meaty dinosaur legs of spawning horseshoe crabs flipped over in their hunts for mates, their tails failing to right them again. Come October, seagulls return to hover just offshore as turtles hatch from their clutches and sprint blind for the sea. Your earliest migrations are south for annual school trips, summer vacations, the Seawitch Festival and Polar Bear Plunge. When your breeding grounds change, you scout new routes to the east on long weekends that make the migration worth the Bay Bridge traffic. You live to fly through corn country at golden hour, chasing sunsets and outrunning grazing deers’ dusk. But you’re so far west now, it takes metal eagles’ wings to deliver you. Home is not home for long, but you always, on instinct, return.
Pamela Huber is an MFA candidate in fiction at the University of Montana who was raised on the waters of the mid-Atlantic. Her writing has appeared in numerous journals including Atlanta Review, Furious Gravity, and Delaware Bards Poetry Review, and has received awards from Glimmer Train and been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. She lives online at pamelahuberwrites.com.
Image: Travel Manitoba, CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
