The Chase

 It's time for this ritual again

as the quarry has appeared,

moving out in the rough like

a jewel--I have seen them

like pure white elk or

perfect red heifers or

an ebony doe, streaking

free and unminded

and then brought down

by a thousand arrows:

or at least, by Heaven! 

the men will try.

Every one of them an attempted sacrifice

to the withered limb of a 

bitter little god with a face

like a dried-out apple.

Powerful witches who had to be

stopped, lest their magic shrink men

to the size they want women to be.

The hunters shout after them: "Medusas! Jezebels!"

as they watch the desired prey,

uncovered hair waving like

tired snakes threatening to snatch

these sorry heroes like

fish in a net. They cry like dogs, 

sent raving mad after a 

flaming brush disappearing into a field--

until the grass itself is set afire

with her brilliance.

They could never hold what they intend to catch;

but they would see it destroyed.

Broken in the Depths

 To break with

the rules and to use these

materials, 

despite all warning;

to reverse Noah, to

submerge and not to

float away from disaster,

but to view death as if

preserved in ice--

a specimen removed from the

current threat--

disrupted the pact between 

us and the deep. 

The intent to view death 

through a porthole,

fulfilled faster than eyeblink, 

as death rushed in, mercifully

faster than understanding could or 

last regrets.

We who lived with their

indeterminacy, 

the Schrodinger's sub, 

imagined horrors within horror 

worse than life itself.

The lungs of acid, brains of fire,

hallucinations of sirens,

Titanic ghosts,

kamis with mouths like lampreys,

shimmering things with seaweed

in their claws,

to depict an underworld with

laws not like ours.

We imagined last conversations

with one another and with a Maker

who understood and did not

forgive and doesn't,

silent as the water still and deep around them.

And yet the water came in

waves like blades in the pressurized depths,

crueler than any human cut-

cleaner overall. 

Tragedy holds no thrall for me,

I leave them here and for all time

the guests of the sea.

Neither deserving nor undeserving,

just unfortunate and fateful, 

unheeding of warnings,

the victims of the depths of curiosity

and the heights of hubris,

Icarus in his fall,

to something lower than the land

is all. 

This Ocean Earth

 The fish are all canaries

in our climate taxonomy. 

The ocean is a coal mine,

and we are too dim to see

that the vanishing pods 

the diminishing schools

reveal that we too are doomed,

made victims and fools.

The dying places in the sea

are deserts made of wet.

 They are where the germ of life

was once made--but yet--

the toxic bloom, the deep sea drill,

we farmed the earth and the sea

too deeply and in the still

of the tides, wrought havoc on the world to be. 

We should dig no further

in this salty mine

lest we pierce the heart 

of the world divine.