Late 18th-century American naturalist

I. Postcard to Bartram

Dear Willy,

You old, romantic son-of-a-gun, you!
Seducing me as you once did
Coleridge and Wordsworth,
laying it on thick with
your eighteenth-century charm.
How florid of you to woo me
with visions of lustrous Florida,
to lure me with lavish exotic tongue.
I swoon to your streams of Latin,
your luscious prose.

This plain is mostly a forest
of long-leaved pine, P. palustris,
interspersed with an infinite variety
of herbaceous plants, and embellished
with extensive savannas, always green,
sparkling with ponds of water,
ornamented with clumps of evergreen,
and other trees and shrubs, as
Magnolia grandiflora, Magnolia glauca,
Gordonia, Illex aquifolium…*

Thus, I read your Travels,
Dover Edition, © 1928.
I confess: I fall in love.

Yours truly, kindly,
K.
XO*p. 52

II. Missive to Bartram

Hark, Puc Puggy! My dearest Flower Hunter,

How apt the name the Alachua gave you!
Ere you stride across the centuries to Florida,
to me, with stave in hand to fend off
wolves and panthers on my behalf,
I feel compelled to scrawl these warning lines.

Fear not for wolves—your Canus lupus is
long gone, extirpated. Your subtropical feline
of the coryii subspecies is not gone, but going;
seventy, at most eighty, now exist.
What an elysium it is, you wrote. Not so, friend.
The woeful truth is: We count your myriad creatures;
we put their names and populations on a list
labeled Endangered; we display their images
on posters emblazoned Extinct.

That tortoise called gopher? Endangered.
That species of jay…of azure blue color,
my heart throb of a scrub jay? Also endangered.
Your open forest of stately pines (Pinus palustris)—
reduced to scattered remnants,
pinpoints on forest service survey maps.
And your watery nations and finny tribes?
Overfished, poisoned, silted in, in waters
drawn as faded red streams on river charts
like a cadaver’s arteries post autopsy.

All cheerful and gay all nature appears.
Sweet William, the Sunshine State is
a locus moribund; your universal vibration of life
but a northbound jet screaming above
your savanna, what we call Paynes Prairie,
a vast preserved grassland, alas dying of thirst.

Because you mayn’t wish to see Florida deflowered,
my Willy, please to not feel obligated
to prosecute your journey. I will understand.
I am loathe to disappoint, or worse.

With utmost affectionate concern, I remain,

Your devoted K.

III. Telegram to Bartram

Notes:
If we are to survive, we must commune with the dead, whether human or nonhuman. We can hear them if we just listen. This poem is a communion with one of my saints, William Bartram, the great late-18th-century American naturalist who left a record of the coastal south from Georgia into Florida to show us exactly what we have lost. Using three forms of communication, a postcard, a missive, and a telegram, I write “Willy” in anticipation of our reunion across time and the life-death continuum. I foreground the natural environment which he and I share (I reside half-time in Florida).

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