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. 

The Fountain (from The Eightfold Path)

Here is a poem from my Eightfold Path cycle -- the first, "Right View":

1. The Fountain (Right View)

Life overflows as it was meant to do,

And rises up a glitt'ring jet and falls

And leaps and spills and rises up again

To wet whatever polished, subtle stone

The fountain-maker found to give it shape.

Then once you learn to step outside and watch,

You see vague, strange, and half-familiar shapes

Begin to rise and fade and rise again,

To fall and form amid the whirling foam,

To call up ev'ry longing you thought lost.

These ghosts could eas'ly draw you in again,

To sink into the wild, oblivious spume,

Or else you might just turn your face away

And hope forgetting all of what you see 

Could bring somehow a solitary peace.

That's when you think you might just take a knife

And send it flashing through the bubbling jet,

But that response won't kill the ghosts you grieve,

For when you know that looking's not enough, 

You have to discipline your eyes to see.

In opening this way, you take a risk,

For insight is a gift of violence

That often has an acrid, bitter taste,

Or harbors joys that seem too much to bear,

But teaches you the discipline to see.

In My House from Songs in Love

Here is a poem from my book, "Songs in Love":
IN MY HOUSE
In my house, there's a marble mantle, with a beveled mirror above it, and in that mirror, I watched you, turning and turning on the dance floor, spinning out the door, onto the balcony, lifting up like a winged seed in the opposite of falling, and I followed as best I could, up the stairs (grey-green, stone steps, dark, mahogany handrail), along a thickly decorated carpet to open a paneled door painted white and yellow, and I stopped, with one hand still on the crystal doorknob because I saw you there -- dark, golden skin shining thru a diaphonous white gown -- and I felt your singing reach out to me, lift me trembling like a butterfly, following the air out the window, up the wall (only the tips of my fingers touching the edges of the ivy), thru the cracked window and into the red room. I closed my eyes and saw red, opened my eyes and felt the red walls pulsing, pounding, repeating this place where I knew myself as a cell, holding captive the water of something else -- something impossible to name... But I knew I could make a choice, make any choice I wanted, so I opened my mouth and found the garden, under the stairs (dogwood trees in blossom, fish and turtles swimming in a gurgling pool where candles and rose petals were floating), and two hands reached up and offered me a flute -- a simple, silver flute with seven holes and no keys -- but they were not your hands, so I followed the tune back into the house, thru the french doors, along the long hallway, only the tips of my fingers touching the edges of the dark wainscotting, not in a hurry, not anxious, but anticipating where you might be, and then you were in my arms, and the ballroom was spinning around us, and the deer were dancing with us on their hind legs, drops of mist filtering the music, and I aksed you to remember, only remember, where and when we passed.