Out of Atchafalaya: a sea of brooks, lakes and endless green – tree green; green waters and moss-ridden cypress stumps. Playground for the birds of prey, offering raucous hallelujahs to swamp gods in the shadow of causeway miles.

Billboards espouse proverbs in the mucky wilderness and advise against degredations to the whooping crane:

“Who poaches the whooping crane?” Asks Charise. “Why?”

“Must be for its whoop.” I reply.

Sanitary napkin of America – the thick carpet of bayou pubic hair knotted and dampened by the flow of detritus and life’s blood spilling out the continent. Choctaw long river stretched back through time on canoes and pirate ships. Air heavy, pregnant and imbued with amniotic fertility of top soils carried from Nebraska cornfields, rusting Ohio factory yards, and Knoxville coal castings to stew among gator’s teeth.

This soup stirred of humanity’s refuse stays uncivilized: eating at the edges of our aspirations; advertising armedgeddon and the great return.

Out of Atchafalaya, cast into the endless expanses of a land of short trees as far as the mind can conceive. Onward from the cradle to Texas’s adolescent plains, where young men dream in the echoes of stolen birdsongs.