Archive
Dry
You know it best only when it’s lost,
In contraries, in opaqueness, in fire and dust,
In the taste of salt on dry lips, and thirst
Crusting as you forage in fissure and cavern
For its trace, remembering the fingers of the rain
That stroked your head, and the thin paths of coolness
They left, and the thoughts of mist and long grass.
Deep, feigning dead, the seeds stand by.
The lizard and the scorpion quiver in the heat,
While, in their blood, the tall flood stacks up.
by Joe Hyam
Read by Dave Bonta — Download the MP3
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Merman
He loves the salt inside me.
Cures my grieving with an unguent
made from starfish limbs and foam.
He trolls oceanic depths,
tidepools I cannot enter.
His silhouette stains a scrim of clouds.
I enter through his singing,
ancient chords, discordant tones.
Myth still intact, I surrender.
No one marks my vigils,
nights I give over to scrying
over piers and jetties.
I write my name on currents
of ocean water and wait
for my lover to surface.
by Gerard Wozek
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A May Flower
Dorothy May Bradford drowned in Provincetown Harbor
while the Mayflower was at mooring, December 7, 1620.
In green-shot bays my sweetheart sleeps;
She pierced the shadow of the boat
And disappeared—still I must keep
My courage safe from fear she floats
With staring eyes into the deeps
Where liquid devils jeer and gloat.
Did sharp-fanged woods spur Dorothy
To drink up death? No way to gloss
Over trials, nowhere to flee…
Her heart could augur only loss.
Whoever thought the changing sea
Would alter crossing into cross?
We pilgrims in the wilderness
Must curb our fancy’s imps and ghosts—
A penitent, I here confess
To glimpsing her along the coast:
I meant to say, God’s peace and rest,
But words fall dead when wanted most.
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Point Lobos, California
watercolor on paper, 6″ x 9″
(Click image to see larger version.)
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Intertidal
She tells me how it lives, quick and rich, between tides;
how its world shifts in swirls and sanded patterns on each waking.
How it scurries to take all that’s offered by each new land
exposed on the moon’s whim, washed in the sea’s run.
How it waits out high tides in a bubble bound with silk,
how each barnacle only has room for one.
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The Mollusc World
Aquarium, Monterey, California
At noon, the great Hand
breaches the world’s rippling membrane
and a jet of pellets
raises a swarm of yellow bee fish.
Coarser pellets meander
awaited by the o-mouthed
blackeyed rockfish who waves transparent ruffled fins
like a drag queen in summer georgette
having wiggled its lump of backside into a hole in the reef
drilled by acid suction of a geoduck clam’s
feeding tube, a plasmatic human-sized phallus.
The clam, spent,
revolving with tidal currents
will stumble across virgin coral.
On the sandy bottom
striped angel wings
refill muscular bellies
raking nutrients through toothed gums.
All dross drifts to spiral-humped moon snails
who cleanse by grazing—
devourer-plows
patient in dim light
where shadows of spectators
swim the glass shield
in a dream of regaining
so gentle a fit.
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Dancing Jellies
by Bethany Pinegar
If you can’t see the video, you need to download Flash (which you also need in order to listen to the audio on qarrtsiluni).
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Inside Leviathan
But actually I didn’t take you far,
not far enough. I started to dream
we were clothed,
trying to make love. That time we crossed
the bridge at night, the lights white moths
to my myopic eyes, shimmering in aureoles
of blurred flutter,
I saw me push you off. I should
have pushed you
into something wetter, to that archaic
world
where knife-edge reds form, gleam
and tune the keyboards
of apartments to cathedrals, where globes
quicken to probes,
poignards that seem to pierce
the dark surface they ride on, that black
horse
latitude of luminescent jellyfish, where
bitter
sardine, small fry, those turned to dragons
by the press
of reflective scales, the dugong mermaids swim, all
plankton inside leviathan.
The Lake Isn’t a Life
but it understands
being forgotten,
has learned to remember itself —
slow heavy depths,
the overflow of night,
earth’s confidante.
Not a color either —
what we call blue, green
but a tone outside the spectrum —
liquefied light,
sky poured into furrows,
cold secret currents.
It’s stubborn —
won’t stop hammering the rocks,
stirring the land —
mottled dream residue,
the aftershock of rain,
my breath made molten.
by Lisken Van Pelt Dus
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