beach mice don’t have half a chance without Watson.
He’s discovered Perdido Key developers want high rises
rising where the beach mice roam. O none of that!
Watson grabs his cap and camera, follows tiny tracks
across the damp sands, across dry and windy sands.
Day and night he’s by their sides, camping out
under the stars, sending back impassioned articles—
how the little mice live, how they eat, love, nest,
their lives happy until trapped with peanut butter
and shipped off to make room and to make money
for out-of-state dentists and out-of-work locals.
Someone must stand by the beach mice. They are all
— Aren’t they? — that stands between us and oblivion.
And so forth on page one, his byline black as a cloud.
So what happens? No one buys it. Who’s he kidding?
Mice and oblivion? The Independent gets heavy mail,
negative, and Watson gets reassigned to — Where else? — obits.
HURRICANE WATSON
O the wild winds! Great spinning flower of rain
blooming off in the Gulf, rising from warm waters
five miles high, a hurricane heads toward Watson.
Who today — Happy Birthday! — turns thirty,
whose big gift is this counter-clockwise tempest,
this tropical depression gone crazy.
He awaits it, spirit tossing like palm trees
the wind waves up and down the beaches.
As the loose air freshens — sigh to moan to wail—
Watson glories in the elementaclass="underline" spitting rain
growing steady, scudding gray clouds lowering,
beasts and human beings scuttling for cover.
Not Watson, headed out into it, ace reporter
on assignment: Our weather plane lumbers
through skies heavy as the heavy deep sea below.
The pilots lean into their instruments,
the navigator whispers numbers,
the weatherman’s eyes widen.
So what if he doesn’t return, so what
if this great storm scatters Watson’s little plane
and he never makes its eye — that balmy paradise—
but spins over the wet, windswept world
for the short remainder of his life, howling
something we down here will hear as the wild,
wild wind. So what if Watson’s blown away.
It’s his birthday and he wants it, bad,
so why not, why the hell not, let him have it.
From Blue Angeclass="underline" Being the Sacred and Profane Life and Times of Watson, Founded on Fact, by Michael Pettit. Copyright Michael Pettit. (“Blue Angel” and “Hurricane Watson” first appeared in the Indiana Review.)