Swale, and: Ghost Forest, and: "I Have Written Myself into a Tropical Glow", and: Scurvy, and: You Like to Think the Whales Are Listening

Abstract

Swale, and: Ghost Forest, and: "I Have Written Myself into a Tropical Glow", and: Scurvy, and: You Like to Think the Whales Are Listening Allison Hutchcraft (bio) Swale In my winter by the sea, I fashioneda new habit: each day walking to Crowley Creek through mudand leafless alder, their branches cupped by the plush green of mosses and rollingbeds of sword fern, whose serrated edges thrust extravagantly into cold and humid air.The creek fed the estuary, which in turn fed the sea—and I liked to see how far upthe tide had reached, or how far it had receded, the marshy banks transformedby that lunar clockwork on which my hours turned.Water called slack, like the grip on a rope loosened, at which point the river would swelland still, the brackish tide having expanded the limits of the creek, submergedgrasses swaying like the drowned hair of a doll. Cold and hard and clear,the water looked like the creek I felt in me. [End Page 29] Day after day I watched gulls float like wooden toys,rocking on the unsteady surface, and studied barnacles clasped to rocks, theshell-white skeletons of small shoreline animals, discarded limbsof driftwood. Swale also meaning a depression, a low placein the land, the sour smell once the water has drawn back,unmasking river sludge and battered sea debris:luminous blue Velella with their fan-like sails, hollow carapaces of crabs,picked at and cleaned— When I swale, I cannottell border from border, land from water. I feel the loamof day crumble. Washed up, what's left?An accumulation of silt. Or sand, sifted, rubbery tendrils of seaweed dotted with notcheslike taste buds inflamed— Sometimes I think love is swale, andsometimes sadness, how each comes in like a tide, how eachalters the bodies beneath. [End Page 30] Heart, be complete, come out of your grave-light—It was decades before I was alive when the estuary was diked to make moreland for pasture, the water no longer water then but fields of sown grassesfor the cows to eat. How they, too, must have tasted it—the memory of waterburied in the new green shoots, the verdant nourishment, still tasting, faintly,of brine. [End Page 31] Ghost Forest As if resurrected, the trees have returned: what's leftof their once buried trunks now jagging through beach sand. We go at low tide so we can see them,and it is easy to walk to those farthest up shore, to peer into their hollows made by wind and by water, followingthe ancient rings, the swollen wood, dark and soft, something to flake with a tool or fingernail.In all the available spaces, blue-gray stones, the surprising white of shattered shells,as if someone had lodged them there deliberately. Delicate, bone-like, barnacles encase trunk after trunk,each exoskeleton as small as a stud earring and open at the top, like an erupted volcano or extracted molar.Farther north, in the outskirts of Alaska's archipelagos, [End Page 32] if the earth ruptures we will feel it. The seawill swell with tsunami waves, covering roads and towns, breaking apart the shore as two thousand years agothese spruce broke from high cliff shelves. And when they were buried it was instantly—flanks of land collapsing, swallowed, and the animals, too, their pelty sinking. Called ghost, but lookhow what's left stubbornly remains, not ghost at all but solid, stunted branches, radial and smooth,the polished wood now green with a fine algae or limp strands of seaweed, which, when the tide returns, will riselike candles taking flame. Look closer: there is always something ready to bury us.Slabs of damp sand break off into the creek that cuts this beach in two— in the Arctic, whole glaciersfracture this way, the oceans everywhere rising. [End Page 33] A woman wades across the silty creek, carryingher small dog in the cleft of her jacket— her legs more and more submerged,nearly up to her hips now— the look on her face— [End Page 34...