Poems About Southwest Pass, Louisiana

Southwest Pass: The Main Shipping Channel of the Mississippi River Delta

Southwest Pass is the primary channel. Of all les passes where the Mississippi River divides at the delta and reaches for the Gulf, this is the one the oceangoing ships use: 47 feet deep, scoured by the Eads jetties and held at that depth by the river itself, the route that has carried commerce south through the delta since 1879. James Buchanan Eads built the parallel stone jetty walls into the Gulf to constrict the channel and force the river to do its own dredging, and the river obliged. The channel he scoured is still the deepest navigable route to the sea that the Mississippi system offers, and the ships still use it.

The bar pilots who work Southwest Pass board vessels at the river mouth and guide them through. These are the people who know the channel by water color, current, and the feel of moving through a passage that is at once fixed and constantly in motion. The pilot transfer happens at sea: the pilot boat comes alongside the ship, and the pilot climbs a rope ladder on the ship's hull in open water. From there, the ship threads the jetty-scoured channel north into the delta, or south into the Gulf, carrying the freight of a continent.

Life at Southwest Pass: Bar Pilots, Deep-Draft Ships, and the Channel That Carries the Continent

The bar pilot station at the river mouth is where the work begins. Pilot boats run out to meet the incoming ships before they reach the bar, the shallow edge that marks where the channel shallows before the Eads jetties deepen it again. The pilots are licensed for this specific passage: knowing this channel, its currents, its behavior in different seasons and different weather conditions, where the bottom is and what the water is doing above it.

The vessels that use Southwest Pass are the large ones. Deep-draft container ships stacked high with boxes. Tankers carrying crude oil and refined products. Bulk carriers loaded with grain from the Midwest, coal, phosphate, the agricultural and industrial output of the interior. The river runs brown and heavy past the jetty walls, carrying silt from half a continent, the color of water that has traveled a long way and picked up everything available along the route. The jetty walls hold the channel in alignment, forcing the current to maintain its own depth.

The lighthouse at the mouth has stood at the pass entrance through storms that tested the jetty walls and the people who depend on them. On the shallower edges of the pass, shrimping boats work the water outside the main channel, running the margin where the big ships do not go. The storms that come up from the Gulf have hit this coast repeatedly, and the pass and the people who work it have continued. This is where the continent pours itself into the Gulf: the freight, the silt, the water, the commerce, the work.

Featured Poem: Southwest Pass

In Mitchell Parfait's voice: the bar pilot transfer at dawn, the rope ladder on the moving hull, the Eads jetties teaching the river to scour its own channel, the brown water carrying silt from half a continent, and the ships threading the deepest passage in the delta south into the Gulf. He writes from Dulac, Louisiana, a bayou community on the Gulf Coast where the knowledge of what water does is immediate and inherited.

The poem opens on the channel's defining quality: depth without apology, the jetty walls holding the river to the work Eads assigned it. The pilot transfer happens before first light, in open water, on a rope ladder alongside a moving hull. The brown river carries the interior of a continent south past the jetty walls. The Eads principle appears in four plain lines: constrict the channel, force the current down, let the water do what water does when given nowhere else to go. The container ship threads the pass at speed. The lighthouse marks the turn where the river becomes the Gulf. And the close names the pass's function without sentiment: the ships come north carrying what the world needs, the river carries them through, and that is what a pass is for.

Mitchell Parfait, Dulac Poetry, and the Gulf Coast Places Where the Work Is Physical and the Water Is the Road

Mitchell Parfait writes from Dulac, Louisiana, a bayou community on the Gulf Coast where the water is the road and the work is physical. His collection Dulac Poetry moves through coastal Louisiana with the knowledge of someone who understands what the passes do: how they carry commerce and silt and the drainage of a continent, how the bar pilots do their work, how the jetty walls hold the river to a function it would not maintain on its own. Southwest Pass is the center of this cluster of delta poems: the deepest channel, the one the ships use, the one that Eads's engineering made viable for oceangoing vessels in 1879 and that has remained viable since.

Dulac Poetry is a collection about places where the work is done at the waterline. Southwest Pass is the most consequential of those places in terms of commerce: the channel through which the agricultural and industrial output of the interior reaches the world, where bar pilots board ships in open water and thread the jetty-scoured passage that the river keeps open by running through it. Parfait writes from inside this world, from a community that knows the passes by their function and their weather. The book is available on Amazon in paperback ($12.99) and Kindle ($3.99).

From the bayou. By Mitchell Parfait.

DULAC POETRY — Available on Amazon

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Explore Dulac Poetry on Amazon

If Southwest Pass holds you: the bar pilot climbing the rope ladder on the moving hull before first light, the Eads jetties teaching the river to scour its own channel, the brown water carrying half a continent south past the stone walls, the container ship threading the deepest passage in the delta, and the lighthouse marking the turn where the river becomes the Gulf. Mitchell Parfait's DULAC POETRY captures that world from the inside, written from Dulac, Louisiana, where the knowledge of the passes is immediate and inherited.

DULAC POETRY by Mitchell Parfait. Paperback ($12.99) and Kindle ($3.99) on Amazon. Louisiana poetry from the delta passes, the bar pilots, and the channel that carries the continent's commerce south.

Find more poems about the Mississippi River delta passes at South Pass, Head of Passes, Pass a Loutre, Port Eads, and Woodlawn. Read about the book on the book page or learn about Mitchell Parfait.

Poems from Southwest Pass, Louisiana, the deepest shipping channel of the Mississippi River delta. The Eads jetties that taught the river to scour its own passage to 47 feet. The bar pilots who board ships in open water and guide them through. The brown river carrying half a continent south past the stone walls. By Mitchell Parfait from Dulac, Louisiana.