Elliot Key

Jagged hunks of poisonous coral

sun struck in briny spray,

Swamps mosquito-ridden, stinking

salt muck, mangrove strangled.

Plants with needle points, planks with pegs and nails.

Jelly fish, orphan bottles, driftwood. Entwined, entangled.

Guarding Elliot Key, garbage heap of the sea.

They blew the glass in Germany

and filled it full of whiskey

and loaded it on the sailing ships.

With torches and kilns in Portugal

and gobs and sticks and cups molten hot,

bubbles were blown for future madeiras.

Came lamps from France and fragile flasks

from St. Germaine in blues and browns

and demijohns from Greece and Rome.

Floats were forged in Britain’s fires

and carved from wood in Africa.

An Inca woman shaped the clay in brown mud

with bronze hands berry-stained she

gently pressed delicate flakes of gold.

A hundred thousands bottles, tall and short,

lean and fat, round and square, red and gray,

long necked, squat, glass and wood and clay

were stored on ships that God and the sea saw fit to sink.

Turning dreams and greed into flotsam and jetsam and wreck and ruin

and floats and flasks and sunburned glass and weathered bottles

dodging hurricanes troughs and storm-gargled waves,

following the currents and tides and Gulf-spawned streams

to Elliot Key, castaway haven of the sea.

Stinging cuts from craggy coral scalpels

scraped and burning in the salty sea

Cannot dissuade destiny’s scavengers

culling scraps secreted deep within your vitals

Searching for sea-spurned treasures history laden.

Sucking the hidden gold from your weathered heart.

Stripping Elliot Key. Graveyard of the sea.