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But what if you have never seen mangroves, never
seen how the roots grow down from the
branches even as branches grow up
from the roots? Walking on stilts is how
they look; unbalanced, the motion
chosen, and with a crab’s scuttle of indirections.
Think of the pipes of an organ, and you’ve
got it, almost. The pipes leaning over to one
side like a bashed-in fence, an experimental
organ or a strange and ancient
instrument that lets out from time
to time a creaking
like a boat straining at its moorings, a sound
insects have learned to imitate
and make louder. But what if you have
never seen how small roots push out
of a bigger root, the whole contraption
swaying in the breeze in plain view, it
looks like the foot
of a huge bird, there is even
that fourth toe bent backward that allows it
to hang on — to what? To air? Sometimes
a tree grows over another tree,
actually, a lot of them are doing this, they’re
a crowd out of control. At the ends of
the roots, the roots swaying
in air, little woody tufts and silky
green tendrils, the whispy
idea of a root, the tufts look unfinished,
which is the way something still growing
has to look, I suppose, and there are
rings in the roots like joints
a plumber adds to pipes where extension
is an afterthought. If you assume
intention, then more like
a spyglass pulling out. For you who have never
seen a mangrove, not one, I give these
definitions: an idea repeated over and over
with few variations; or a complicated
network of ideas. Onto the roots of fullgrown
mangroves little oysters suck and hold tight.
Fiddler crabs insert their own hurry, their
betwixt and between, and the incoming
tide with its slaps and gurgles —
but for you who have stood
before mangroves a long time and touched
the fat, the thick green leaves, isn’t description
superfluous, or worse, a fancy engine
to make trees obsolete?
And for you who have not, who
have never seen a mangrove, never licked
salt from those fat leaves, isn’t
there a danger some simile, some
looks like, may put down roots
in you, and more roots, prop and malaprop,
until there is a jungle growing out
of control, until the roots in you
will have to put down roots
in another and another? When will
it stop? Will it stop?
And haven’t I, putting in my own two
cents about mangroves, stepped
all over them, mounting
my own grotesque architecture
over their architecture? And what is
the urge to describe, is it
like the urge that comes over sightseers
on boats to wave to total strangers on shore
who, in turn, have to wave back? Why
are we always waving to
each other? And maybe you think
rooting in the air is for the birds, and please
leave alone those sharp dead-looking thrusts
poking up from the muck — by which I take
you to mean the seedlings sticking up
like fat cigars. But oh
mangroves, men in groves, men in droves, are
you really cheaper by the dozen?
In the mangrove swamp the fall of a leaf
is an event as it hits
branches and other leaves on its way down to
more leaves brown and drying and dried up.
Sometimes the sun lights up a place
between trees, making it seem special, a place
where something is about to happen, but
all that happens is after
a while the light moves elsewhere.
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