The Midnight Country

Like most faults
it starts small,
the Hudson Canyon,
front porch of the eponymous
delta, drowned
when the glaciers receded.

It runs away
from the shallow pubic triangle
of New York and New Jersey;
Babylon’s great whore,
inseminated with the runoff
of four hundred years
of mercantilism.

At bottom a toxic, aphotic hell
where methane pits leak
ten thousand feet
under the waves, and under pressure,
a bare degree above freezing.

There exists
a permanent snowstorm
of mercury and lead, PCBs, chlorine,
nitrates, phosphates, and petrochemicals, mixed
with the decomposing cells
of every living thing,
falling gently in midnight drifts
as exotic and deadly
as the moons of Jupiter.

Citizens of the republic
of light and air
need rarely consider
our effluential issue;
for the pretty waves, the pretty waves
that never stir the midnight country.

©Robert J. Howe, 2016