“Not the Ocean?”
Landlocked here
in Princeton—haven’t seen
the ocean in a year.
Is it still there?
The footage
last night on the news looked…
maybe archival?
And the rumors
are terrible—
no sharks, no whales,
the reefs bleached
to a sterile paleness,
and an eighth continent,
petabits
of polystyrene and acrylic,
replacing the Pacific.
Are you sure?
Those white, anonymous
filets they sell me
in old-style paper
might be from farms,
fish libraries, alt-lakes,
and the last
oyster I sipped
from its little
rocky basin—
did it have just
the weak-with-Arctic
-icemelt, hydrocarbon
tang of this
particular
bad year of ocean?
Maybe a relic?
I could ask my Brooklynites
who ride the elevated F
to look up from their phones,
but it’s hard
to tell the harbor’s distant blue
through those tiny, glaring windows
from simulation—could they be sure
it was real, it was now?
I’ve searched
the papers, but the things
these days that pass unsaid
are world-size. I might be
the last to know
what Matthew Arnold long ago
discerned,
the melancholy, long, withdrawing roar
of the Sea of Faith retreating
down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world—
maybe withdrawn
into a subduction zone?
Could you swear, have you checked?
I mean, within the hour?
As easily as you wake,
your round eyes dry,
and blink,
it could be gone,
since even its superstorms
and rogue waves, seen
in proportion, are a slick
on an eight-thousand-mile
sphere of rock,
a ball rolled through wet grass
into hot sun.
Once I was surer
what was what—the word
under my feet, the sky, the stars,
and from the shore,
Relax, my mother called,
lie back and put your arms out straight
and it will hold you.
*
“Grid”
All energy, to that engineer,
the Soul, is the same.
Today’s illumination might have come,
way back, from either love or pain—
no whiff, when the light flicked on,
of coal, or falling water, or uranium.
__________________________________
From For Now by James Richardson. Used with permission from Copper Canyon Press. Copyright © 2020.
