Back Home in the Kelp Forest
Read
this in one salty breath -- all you have
after your plunge into the good gold sunlight
of the kelp grove taller than you knew --
the stipe and blade of living rope in this dancing
city wave after wave -- wolf eel, dogfish, nudibranch,
urchin, anemone, brittle star, kelp fish, rock fish,
coon-stripe shrimp -- your cousins everywhere
in the life maze. Forget their names and seize
that shaft of sunlight, that bubble swirl the moon-heart
drummed from the deep. Be the two-world otter
at play where you flounder, where you yearn like
octopus, where abalone grip on stone is also yours,
your breath your own holdfast to that other life that
finally lets you go, let's you dream you have learned
to breathe through skin and live
wherever you will.
Six Poem Sequence:
Coastal Stream
Take me down through forest light
where gold sun grows me tall
and blue water carries me away.Estuary
Let me ooze through eelgrass roots,
taste salt, surrender into water's ebb
dizzy in the vast and hungry tide.Sandy Beach
Where the sun must crawl and seek,
scatter me among the beach jewels
where I am but a splinter, crystal, nub.Rocky Beach
Where the last cliff kneels to salt,
shatter me in a moonlight wave
and tug me toward the deep.Kelp Forest
Bring me home to sunlit spangle --
in kelp, I come back to my forest ways,
dancing gold in the green city.Open Sea
Let me go where whales roll
and plunge. I spangle free,
singing deep in the open sea.