Keeping It All Afloat

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Through vivid encounters with creatures of land, sea, and air in Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula, the poet weaves memory and reflection into a reckoning with joy, loss, and her own place in a damaged world. The book takes its title from words by poet Audre Lorde: “Only by learning to live in harmony with your contradictions can you keep it all afloat.”

“Ingrid Wendt’s poems vibrate with a pulse for our endurance: a sensory poet’s innate negative capability. Wendt shines her language on classic verities of truth and beauty while still bearing witness to horror and grief. Sometimes the poet is at “the wet, level edge of the world.” With understated playfulness, she takes us into the Yucatán jungle’s pyrotechnics of berries and leaves. Starburst recognitions! Her precision and observation reveal hidden miracles.”
~ Anne Waldman, author of Mesopotopia

“With tenderness and awe, Wendt’s poems recreate the splendor of a tropical jungle on the Yucatán coast. Wendt captures the cacophony (and mating!) of birds, the chirping of nearly transparent lizards, and the dazzling fish in undersea hush. She brings a moral reverence, with poem after poem presenting the complex balance of human interaction with the natural world. This is a profound and memorable work!”
-Barbara Ras, author of The Blues of Heaven

Excerpts from Keeping It All Afloat

ON THE NATURE OF BUTTING HEADS

What could be sweeter than breakfast on the palm-fringed

terrace, so you set down your bowl of jungle fruit

and dart inside for coffee. And, shit,

if the Long-Tailed Grackle hasn’t darted faster—out

of nohere!—is pissed

you’re back before he can snatch a bite.

But does he fly away? Nope. One hop,

he’s on the stucco wall nearby,

clicks and clucks and cocks his head in your direction,

flies to the top of the wooden ramada just a few

feet farther, his rasping snare drum of a throat tracking

the seconds, his yellow eyes waiting for you

to slip up again. Never say die. And when at last

he resorts to scolding, oh my, every jet-black feather

stands on end, he plumps up twice his normal size and

a great, low roar begins, a whole-body shudder, a stomach

rumble shivering, quivering as it rises out his open beak.

Such unflagging cacophony, and all from just one mouth!

King of the morning, he thinks you’ll bow to his command.

And can you blame him, you foolish trespasser into his realm?

You, whose rental house was plopped right on top

of old-growth guanabana trees. You evil bringer and taker-

away of a pittance—a tiny pittance—of

reparation. Fruit in a bowl. And tomorrow you’ll do it again.

AWAKENED TOO EARLY, I CONSIDER THE NATURE OF BEAUTY

Again this morning the same Tropical Mockingbird (in-between

flitting from branch to branch, no leaves to be seen) pours out

non-stop every tune its DNA-programmed brain can sing:

trills of warblers, trills of canaries, house finch tremolos,

coloraturas of house wrens and even

birds who never venture this far south: heavenly solos

that could be taken for glad

tidings—Look! The sun!—that could be brave

refusals to echo my own despair of a world headed

down the path of destruction: bird

who only yesterday chased away the larger, fatter,

Yellow-bellied Kiskadee, claiming

all these thousands of berries for its very own, though clearly

no bird stomach could have that much room. Cruel

bird, whose California cousin I once watched

peck to death a nest of newly-hatched mourning doves,

then skedaddle. How

can a bird who sings with the voices of cherubim

be so horrible? This

I ponder, though I know better:

beauty and goodness are not always on the same team.

Bless this bird who has no notion of savagery.

Bless each holy interlude of my forgetting.

IF, ON THE MENU, GROUPER

didn’t appear, or when it did, the words of warning

facing extinction were right next to the price

If tourists could look past the lure of exotic

If Grouper were not so tasty, flaky-firm, and almost no bones

If pesos didn’t revolve around Grouper, nor lives

of cooks and waiters with families of six in one room

If the fiction of plentiful didn’t slide with such ease from tongues

If anyone dared to question

If Grouper never made courtship sounds and didn’t

gather each year from hundreds of miles around

If undersea microphones were never designed to eavesdrop for

days on end to the world’s largest dance of the most intricate pairing

of spotted, slowly changing reds and browns circling, spiraling, swirling and coupling

If overfishing at sites of mating did not threaten

If overfishing meant breaking a law and the penalties, harsh

If beauty and wonder could put food on the table

If conscience could shelter each head

If, in our fragmented minds, opposing realities

never dangled, like these sentences

like the future of our world

If the lures of hope were never

Blue Morpho

As when – moments before your eyes

closed that one last time, you opened them wide, your face

the face of the morning sky when the sun at last

crests the far

eastern edge of our world – as when I asked

what do you see and your voice was luminous,

yearning – “Sanctuary! Sanctuary!” – something

just beyond the blank, pale-green hospital wall, and then

“Birds,” you whispered. “Birds!”

As when I asked if you wanted to go there,

As when you nodded,

As when I said “Okay. It’s okay. You can go,”

As when you sighed and turned to smile and we kissed

three times, sweet

flutters of butterfly wings – just yesterday, here in Akumál,

where for the first time in oh, so many adventures I’m here

without you, I never dreamed at the dive shop to find

a pair of bark-mottled, gray-brown wings (unremarkable

but for their size: big as my palm!) frantically scanning

top to bottom the whole big plate glass window holding them

back from the blazing green jungle beyond. Not

thinking of you at all, right then, I cupped closed wings

in my hands and – gently, firmly, with thumb and index finger –

kept them closed and rushed them out the open door where Oh!

they were Blue! – pulsing, shimmering, open – Blue! – iridescent

splash of sky returning to sky. Good bye, Good bye,

You Beauty! My Love! I’m here. You’re there. For now.

PRAYER

~On retreat in Mexico, news arrives from the North

I’ve lifted my face to the great night sky, but any wonder

I used to feel is gone. And what are the songs

Of birds, who once brought joy? Nothing but blind instinct

The staking of claims: which parts of the jungle are theirs

And theirs alone: ways to find each other

Over earth’s constant, low hum, fierce wind in the palms

Yesterday starting like any other, waving goodbye

Lunch buckets in hands, and the crack

Crack of the gun that does not stop

And the blood

And the children who never

*

Water, great giver and taker, help me to remember

How to cradle wonder and still bear witness to horror and grief

How to let protest and beauty share the same beats of the heart

*

All the way from the wet, level edge of the world

The long, long path of the rising moon

Shimmers and streams

Right to your feet and mine

No matter on which shore, whose continent, we stand.