Hester DeCasper  

Carrot Island 

In the sun-bleached summertime, 
out of a listing canoe,
through scrubby forests, around the droppings of wild horses left by 
colonial failures,
and clouds of biting flies.
It’s like coming out of Hades only to realize 
that paradise 
is a white strip, a quarter mile across, simmering in a warm gray sea.
Past that threshold, the carcasses:
the peeling tortoise leather, shards of black paint
off a fragile hull, 
and translucent crab shells, hollow in the grass.  
Square dolphin teeth and combs of baleen, horse ribs and spine and skull.  
They do not so much rot as evaporate, 
not down into the earth 
to feed the grass, but up into the wind.  
You cannot select their smell from the breath you take in, 
they are the sand at your feet and the salt on your skin.
And every still night the tide draws back to show the hidden floor.
The horses come down to mutter over wind whipped oats, 
stepping lightly over white bones, hooves clicking the thickness
of clam shells, as close as they will come to cobblestone.