The End of Landscape

By Randall Mann Randall Mann

There's a certain sadness to this body of water

adjacent to the runway, its reeds and weeds,

handful of ducks, the water color

manmade. A still life. And still

life's a cold exercise in looking back,

back to Florida, craning my neck

like a sandhill crane in Alachua Basin.

As for the scrub oaks,

the hot wind in the leaves was language,

Spanish moss—dusky, parasitic—

an obsession: I wanted to live in it.

(One professor in exile did,

covered himself in the stuff as a joke—

then spent a week removing mites.) That's

enough. The fields of rushes lay filled

with water, and I said farewell,

my high ship an old, red Volvo DL,

gone to another coast, another peninsula,

one without sleep or amphibious music.

Tonight, in flight from San Francisco—

because everything is truer at a remove—

I watch the man I love watch

the turn of the Sacramento River, then Sacramento,

lit city of legislation and flat land.

I think of Florida, how flat.

I think of forgetting Florida.

And then the landscape grows black.

Source: Breakfast with Thom Gunn (The University of Chicago Press, 2009)

Biography

Randall Mann’s poems are often set within the landscape of Florida or California. Influenced by Philip Larkin, Elizabeth Bishop, and Donald Justice, Mann’s poetry—at once vulnerable, unflinching, and brave in its ambivalence—explores themes of loss, attraction, brutality, and expectation. Of his preference for working in form, Mann says, “Form helps me approach more comfortably the personal, helps me harden argument.”

Mann is . . .

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