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CEDAR
KEY
It
rains every day at three,
regular,
tropical rain.
Children
with plastic cups
trap
the shrimp-grey mullet
from
the creamy surf.
In
a beach bar the topless go-go girl
is
eight months pregnant.
But when we reach Cedar Key
there is none of this.
On the way
The
roads are raised out of swamps.
The
straight uninhabited roads
are
stained with the bodies
of
buzzards and armadillos.
In
a bottomless lake, at the edges,
the
cypress knees
are
the knees of a Seminole maiden.
Then the hot ghost town on the Gulf.
Even the cars go there to die.
Broken
insect screens, broken porches,
a
petrol drum on a veranda,
paint
peeled, storm-wood unpainted.
A
hurricane has torn a restaurant from its piles;
A
restaurant has replaced it.
Even
the tourists are old, are few.
The
streets white-hot, empty.
And
the pencil factory is dead,
the
salt cauldron
outside
the museum dead,
the
mud-grey water,
completely
slack to the dazzled horizon,
is
dead;
the
flat, uninhabited keys, green-fledged,
drifting
on the horizon,
are
dead.
(Is
the Gulf always so calm?)
There
are no glossy postcards
of
Cedar Key
as
there are on the other side of Florida’s north
with
its alligator farm,
children
in the surf,
go-go
girl,
and
the miles of motels.
Rather,
there are these
hand-drawn,
hand-tinted,
uncompetitive,
unexciting,
dead,
profitless,
careful
pictures.
It
is a place of death,
Cedar
Key,
and
the road there
is
as straight as honour
over
spiky swamps.
When
you go to live there your children
will
not visit often,
but
you may nonetheless be content
(two
old ladies in the road
in
front of our car
were
content).
The
dead railroad,
the
factory, dead,
and
the dead salt-cauldron
will
not matter.
Goodbye,
Cedar Key,
I
know you are waiting
at
the end of the earned world.
Alan
Marshfield
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