Archive
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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Brooding
Clearwater River, Swan Valley, western Montana
(Click on image to view at larger size.)
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Replenish
A windless freeze
sets the lake early this year,
black ice.
Stare down hard
into this watery clearing
and see all the way to springtime:
leaves become trees that sway,
fish crouch in their bones awaiting
the iridescent thaw,
pollen, roe, and eggs hatch into
raucous food.
I watch my husband and son skate
in and out of another winter,
their itineraries marked in scrapings,
accompanied by croaking ice
and the shadow of crows.
by Lynne Shapiro
Week’s Rain
the seasonal stream
dividing our near pasture
from the back field
where I make my best
late June hay has swollen
this January—its white
slashing teeth threaten
to take out the culvert bridge
already its rushing shoulders
massive as a running back’s
erode the banks, undercut
roots of wild cherry and plum,
whip blackberry vines
like witch’s hair in the flow
by Ed Higgins
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