Poems About Nature — Written on the Water in Dulac, Louisiana

Why Most Poems About Nature Read Like Postcards (And This One Doesn't)

People who type poems about nature into a search bar are usually looking for one of two things — a little calm, or a little recognition. The first kind of reader gets served a thousand pleasant lines about birds and wind and changing light. That's a fine tradition. There's a whole shelf of it at every bookstore in America. This isn't that shelf.

Most nature poetry comes from people who go out into nature and come back to write about it. Hikers. Weekenders. Visitors. They see something striking, they remember the smell of the air, they sit down at a desk a long way from the trail and they put it on the page. Their work has its place. But there is a different kind of nature poetry — the kind that comes from people for whom nature isn't a destination at all.

In Dulac, Louisiana, nature isn't where you go on the weekend. It's the parking lot. It's the office. It's the pulpit and the alarm clock. The bayou is the road. The Gulf is the grocery store. The marsh smell is what your jacket smells like when you take it off in the kitchen at the end of a long day.

Mitchell Parfait — the man who wrote it — grew up where this is just the truth of the geography. His poems don't observe nature. They're written from the inside of it. What follows is five things nature actually does to a person who lives inside it, and how the book carries each one without fanfare.

The Air Before a Storm

The first sense Gulf Coast people develop isn't sight. It's barometer. You feel a storm in your sinuses an hour before the radio knows. You feel it in the small joints. You feel it in the way your ears want to pop. The body becomes the forecast, and the forecast on the kitchen counter becomes the second opinion.

The marsh changes color before the rain. The grass goes a shade paler. The cypress goes still in a way that looks wrong because cypress are almost never still. The pelicans get low. The egrets disappear into the reeds. The dogs get restless in the yard. Your grandmother starts cooking like she's been cooking for fifty years and nothing surprises her anymore — bigger pot, more rice, extra bread on the counter for whoever ends up at the table when the rain decides where they're sleeping.

This is what nature poetry from Dulac sounds like. Not the storm came. But — the porch swing started moving on its own and we knew. Not the wind picked up, but the cypress went still and the air went green-grey and my uncle put the truck in the high yard without saying why.

Most nature poetry doesn't capture pre-weather because most poets aren't around long enough to feel it. DULAC POETRY does. It's the difference between writing about the storm from the porch and writing about the storm from the inside of a body that has felt fifty of them and learned that the air is honest about what's coming if you'll listen.

If that's the kind of weather your body remembers — the kind you can feel an hour before anyone else — you can read DULAC POETRY on Amazon. It's closer to the kind of poems about the Gulf you've been hoping someone would finally write. Order the paperback here — it ships in two days.

The Animals That Aren't Decoration

There is a pelican who lands on the same piling at the dock every morning. He doesn't belong to anybody. Nobody put him there. He just shows up before the boats do, and he sits, and he watches. If you ask the men at the co-op about him, they'll tell you his approximate schedule. They know it the way you know your own uncle's schedule. Pelicans don't wear watches and they don't need to.

There is a blue heron that stands in three inches of water for an hour and never moves. There is a dolphin pod that comes through the pass on the falling tide, almost on the same day every season for as long as anybody on that water can remember. There are gulls who follow a specific boat and not the one next to it, for reasons only the gulls know.

In a lot of nature poetry, animals are symbols. They stand in for human feelings. The hawk is freedom, the dove is peace, the deer is grace. That's a fine convention but it's not how people in Dulac actually relate to the animals they live with. The animals here are the cast of the day. They have shifts. They have routines. They have personalities, and the fishermen know them by sight the way you'd know a regular at a diner.

DULAC POETRY treats them that way. It lets them be themselves first. The meaning rises afterward — slowly, the way meaning actually rises in a real life, not the way it's assigned in an essay. The reader who grew up somewhere wild — a farm, a coast, a small town with woods behind it — knows this distinction without having to be told.

Tide, Time, and the Body Clock You Inherit

A Dulac kid learns the tide chart before the multiplication tables. You don't exactly read it — you carry it. Your grandfather carried it. Your great-grandfather carried it. Your great-great-grandfather carried it back when the parish wasn't even called what it's called now. The tide is older than your last name and it doesn't care what your last name is.

The moon down here isn't romantic. It's a foreman. High tide at 4:17 AM means the boat leaves the slip at 3:50, which means the alarm goes off at 3:15, which means the night before ended at 9:00 whether you were tired or not. The shrimp don't care about your weekend. The redfish don't care if your wife wanted to go to a wedding in Houma. The natural calendar runs the human one, not the other way around.

This is what makes the book feel different from poems about the outdoors written by hikers and weekenders. Nature here is a clock you didn't set and can't argue with. It's also a teacher of patience that no human being could ever match. You learn to wait for the tide because the tide is going to come whether you wait for it or not, and you learn that most of the things worth doing in a life operate on the same principle.

The reader who grew up rural — shaped by season and weather and chores that can't be skipped — recognizes this in their bones. It's in the rhythms of the South generally and in this book specifically. The natural cycle becomes the spiritual cycle when you live this close to it — sunrise as mercy, low tide as honesty, harvest as gratitude. That's where nature meets faith on the bayou, and it's a meeting that DULAC POETRY records without ever having to announce.

Why You'll Recognize This Book Even If You've Never Been to Louisiana

You don't have to be from Dulac. You have to have grown up somewhere that taught you weather. Somewhere that taught you to notice. Somewhere that made you small in front of something big before you were old enough to be told that you should be small in front of something big.

A farm in Iowa where the sky is the only thing you can see for three hundred and sixty degrees. A ranch in west Texas where the quiet at noon is so total it feels like a sound. A small town in Vermont where the woods started at the back fence and the fence wasn't much of a fence. A coast in Maine where the fog comes in like it's on the schedule. The book speaks to anyone who learned to read sky before they learned to read books.

DULAC POETRY is Gulf Coast nature poetry — yes — but it's also American nature writing in the older sense. The kind that doesn't separate the natural world from the working world. The kind that doesn't treat nature as a scene the human being walks into for a moment of respite. The kind written by people who understood that the natural world wasn't separate from them — it was the medium they were made inside of.

And when the work is finally done, when the boat is back at the slip and the dock lights are off, the sky in Dulac comes back like it's coming home. The same stars over the bayou that watched your grandfather walk down the dock at 4 AM watch the next generation do the same thing. The bayou is still the road. The Gulf is still the grocery store. The pelican comes back to his piling.

The final image of the book — and the reason a reader who has never been to Louisiana will still recognize it — is a man on a dock at 4 AM, no light, the water flat as a tabletop, a single bird call across the bayou. That's where the poems start. That's where most of the real ones start, anywhere they're written from.

From the bayou. By Mitchell Parfait.

DULAC POETRY — Available on Amazon

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