The Delta region whose waters pour into the Gulf has borne many multiform creatures through the centuries. Human and animal, bird and insect, fish and crustacea have each come under its spell with striking adaptations to this mercurial environment. Whether to facilitate movement on the ground, flight in the air or depth under water, there is little in regard to anatomy that has not changed to suite. A local hunter who lives most of the year in a watershed swamp has grown thin-veined webs between his toes to enhance balance on the spongy ground. A black catfish has generated a bony, horned protuberance just above its eyes to mesmerize prey with. A Jackbird has diminished in girth to elude predators by diving faster and soaring swifter while an orb-weaving spider has sprayed across its web a perfume that mimics mating scents in its diminutive world, and there are many more examples.


And, of course, there are some creatures – no doubt, from each species – who, for reasons of their own, not only replicate these kinds of mutations but do so with great success, so that they seem ever more natural, even to the point of one species infusing another with an external or internal form – sentinel reciprocations that heighten the stakes for each and every one of us attuned to it.

I believe the answer to each of these examples is yes although I have little time or instrumentation to prove the point.

This incertitude has its charms.


One further comment: Given the distinctions within this realm, equal to or more than those gained through descriptions of them, the act of writing takes on something of their animous. Words convulse, glitter, evaporate, reanimate, corporealize, convex, deracinate. Meaning follows and, while still compelling on its own, gains something more: sonic, even musical resonance that fabulates, one vowel or consonant at a time. And language, however quotidian it was beforehand, flashes with utopian salts – the better to eat clouds by; clouds that rise from the vernal Earth.