Coral Reef

Here's a new piece in progress (comments welcome, please):

CORAL REEF

If you spend an hour or so floating above a coral reef, your eyes will adjust to the color of the light. The multitude of shades  of gold and black, silver and turquoise, will shimmer in the pale sheen reflected from the bottom. A healthy coral reef holds more species than the Amazon rainforest, and their parade of shapes and colors is more than the eye can digest or the mind conceive. You just have to let your consciousness float along with your body, so that your sense of awe and wonder is not confused by thought.

Then you can watch the schools of parrotfish shifting in choreographed, synchronized  suddenness, or the lightning flash of the anemone fish’s bright orange, disappearing into purple tipped tentacles of the anemone which is its home; your eyes will flash as if blinking as thousands of antias fish shimmer green and then white, and then purple, shifting around the limbs of the green tree coral – you will be surrounded by so much color that you won’t even be able to call it color, as the names orange, blue, green, and yellow are so inadequate to the myriad, multitudinous flashes of light and substance, of creature and water, that the word “sky” will become an impossibility.

That’s why, when you finally lift your head up out of the water, what you see above will be purple, a miscalculation of the air you thought you knew, because the incomprehensible, inimitable, virtually infinite incongruity that you once so glibly called a coral reef has inverted your perception and made you gasp for air.

Now you may have taken the dive course at the local pool and bought yourself a nice set of fins and a mask and snorkel, and rented the tank from the tour company that also brought you out in the boat (after you’d saved up enough vacation days and managed to buy a plane ticket and book a hotel and pick out some new beachwear), but what about your children?

Or your children’s children?

Because these corals are cnidarians, a living animal that can be as small as a child’s fingernail, with a mouth and tentacles to sweep in plankton and organic matter from the water around it. And as it feeds and grows, it secretes calcium carbonate to form a skeletal “house” as hard as concrete. When it dies, the next generation grows on the skeleton of the one before it, slowly growing a half an inch or less per year.

So the mile or so of coral reef that you may have found yourself floating above could be as much as 50 million years old,

But the symbiotic algae that live inside the coral have disappeared in the warming water, and the corals have bleached white –

Or they’ve been left broken with round craters from the fishermen dropping home-made bottle bombs into the reefs to catch ever greater quantities of fish –

Or the heads of the coral have died from the cyanide squeezed out of a bottle by the divers who use the poison to stun those colorful tropical fish that bring so much money in the aquariums of New York and LA and Hong Kong –

Or they’ve suffocated from the red bloom of algae that have grown so numerous feeding on the sewage runoff flowing down the Missippi into the sea, choking off the air from these living,breathing creatures.

Me, I’m just sick, because I hear inside my ears the loss of angelfish, the absence of anemones, the end of spiny lobsters, and the vacant wandering of sharks, but here, now,  in this room I hear nothing.