Dissolution

I could say that I spent last week on the coastline of southern Louisiana, but being down there reminds me that there’s no line on that coast.  Instead, we’ve got a watery borderlands into which everything solid slowly oozes.  I don’t think of Auden as a poet of the American South, but his lines were rolling around in my head all week —

…the silent dissolution of the sea

Which misuses nothing because it values nothing.

The human struggle down there is all about “use” and “value” — the conflicting needs of the Mississippi, which wants to jump its banks & shift its mouth over to the Atchafalaya River Delta; the needs of the oil & gas industries, who service their off-shore rigs through Port Furchon, which will soon be an island; the needs of fisherman both commercial & sport; the needs of people whose land is slowly reverting to open water.  It’s a landscape that looks like a seascape. 

More to come…