I.

Thanks to the Corps of Engineers, the island
Has come to this: erasure, a spit of sand
Becoming thinner in eight-hour shifts
Supervised by the moon. A whole life drifts
Down shore, the sum of all that came before—
Indigo, rice, the flash and tumult of war
(The ditch where Colonel Shaw exhorts his blacks
To swarm the batteries in doomed attacks).
The lighthouse, half-submerged, is somehow grander
Since it embraced the status of outlander,
Now that ocean floods its separate rooms,
The island’s ghosts, and the ghosts’ tombs . . .
The only things that will remain are sea
And the cataracted eye of memory.

II.

This morning’s dawn patrol delivers me
Its daily wreck of half-dead, coughed-up debris,
And in the western darkness skeletons
Of old storm-eaten homes offer their bones
To the wind. Seasons spin and coexist:
The air is warm, the ocean a clenched fist;
Its gnawing troughs tilt a series of buckles,
Pushing up foam into a row of knuckles.
They all have names, the newer houses here—
Duned Youth, Dixie Sunrise, The Buccaneer—
Replacing what was real with real estate.
I suppose the sea will come to desolate
These, too, in a grand sweep of ciné-vérité
Urging us to look, and look away . . .

III.

It’s difficult to know for certain things
That constitute so many false beginnings
And ends. This is at least the tenth New South
Since the one christened by the hangman’s mouth
And burning cross. Beyond the sawgrass plain
This morning’s fog descends like Solarcaine
Upon the steepled skyline of a town
That wears its boutonnieres upside down.
Its avenues acquired a lawyer’s eye
For detail. Each monument stands like an alibi;
Each public place and renovated shop
Wears the inconspicuous air of a stage prop,
Selling to snowbirds our mild Decembers
And a story that forgets and misremembers.

 
J. S. Renau is a native of Charleston, S.C. For 15 years, Mr. Renau lived in New York and worked as a marketing consultant and speechwriter. In 2012, he relocated to rural South Carolina. His poems and reviews have appeared in American Book Review, Contemporary Poetry Review, Paris Review, and Wallace Stevens Journal, among other publications.