The Plague of Light

The gorgeous Dock Street trees, Australian pine
And dark gray oak, were turned to kindling
By the hard hard freeze of nineteen sixty-two,
That stripped the canopy of shading branch and leaf
That kept us cool, genteel, stolling the tropical streets
In white like coconut millionaires.
It became a different place to live.
The light flooded and drove like a living beast
Down on the island. Dock Street people, insects
After a fire in the woods, learned to live
With a naked sky.

Some fixed awnings over the windows and yards.
These were blown away by the high spring winds,
Cartwheeling down the streets, across the sand
And out to sea, prehistoric birds
Beating their way back to another time.

Some gave up on the unprotected grass,
The tender shrubs and flowers killed by heat.,
By the unrestrained unbroken pestilence of light.
They scraped away the stalks and filled their yards
With gravel, cheap, easy to keep and dead as rocks.

The best solution to the plague of light
Was what Miss Covington arranged with Billy Simms
And a couple of his half-wit brothers:
To drive across the Pasco County line
And dig up pines and oaks and –
Billy reading from the list Miss C. provided –
Some nice shrubs.
Three trips at night, Billy’s flat-bed strapped with foliage,
And Miss Covington’s blue cottage bloomed.

She had a party to commemorate the feat,
All welcome and all came to drink the whiskey
From the tiny china cups –
All the Dock Street seamen and rough-hand carpenters,
Drinkers and barmaids and lawyers and Mr. Fennimore,
The Constable, sipping tea under the biggest tree;
They basked like lizards in the cool sweet shade.

When the salt soil leeched the life from those homesick plants
And the withered sad tilt of the trunks announced
The failure of her scheme, Miss Covington
Accepted it with grace – a classy dame, as Billy put it.
He hauled the victims (free of charge) down to the channel
And slid them into the outbound tide.
Miss C., like all of us, gave up, and waits
For generations to restore us, and the trees.
She had her cottage painted blinding white,
The last survivor of the plague of light.