eateat
T
he sea is quite simply everything,
the sea is breath, from that first sight,
a blue line strung between hills,
that first magical capture,
the infinite in a child’s bucket, with minnows.
Rivers flow to the sea, we drew them like blue ribbons
and learned, we came out of it
dragging our simple selves up beaches:
taste us, blood, tears, all salt.
The ocean is our language, its cadences carry us;
pollute language and you have nothing.
Strip off the adman’s adjectives,
the “pristine water” the “turquoise, aquamarine, jade”
the “crystal waters of the Florida Keys.”
The lie echoes everywhere now.
True language is knobby as coral heads,
untouchable, it does not repeat itself.
It is a noun: it is elkhorn, sea fan, hammerhead, grunt.
It is specific, no easy metaphor.
It grows where no plunderer may anchor.
Anything else is shameful,
anything else is a lie.
Suspect all hyperbole,
strip-search simile:
the ocean is not like -
the ocean is.
My grandfather going down daily at 85
to swim in the English channel;
my father striding deeper into cold water,
his children following, my brothers, me.
It’s simple: where you have water, swim.
This is the only verb for it.
The Channel, the North Sea,
the Mediterranean in winter -
all rivers, ponds, lakes, however brown
and lurking with inhabitants,
however chill and dead.
We came out speechless and proud,
the only ones in the bay today,
children hunched and shivering
towelled hard, led home to thaw.
Today I swim in a bath of warm water,
Fort Zachary Taylor beach, this time
knowing why I am the only one,
downstream from filth, from ignorance,
laziness, greed, I trust the ocean’s ability
one more time, to clean; and my own blood
to make the antidote.
As well live on an island and not swim
as in a house with a loved one and not touch.
The notice on the tree says
innocence is finished. Know
what you swim in,
where the danger lies.
With the fish,
you have become endangered,
with the reef coral, scarred,
your words can’t flourish,
without oceans there is no poetry.
Poets are here to clean language
as lobsters, before the slaughtering,
clean ocean floors.
Downstream, there isn’t much to say
but No. You are in the tide of lies,
you swim anyway, against today’s current
as you have to, say names aloud like litanies,
pray for the change.
S
ometimes you can see the universe in a day
when you watch it from start to finish.
It’s not the same one hour to the next,
oh no, it’s so different.
While galaxies spin in space,
taking us millions of miles from the beginning point,
the day takes us, in an hour, to a place far away
from where we were sixty minutes ago.
The sun is bright
and then the clouds rain
and the winds come up, then it’s calm again.
And where the ray skates,
pleasure and pain swiftly follow,
to be gone for days before he returns.
The change is minute-to-minute, hour-to-hour.
A lifetime can be lived in a day...
and often is, by these modest creatures of the reef.
Each day’s a lifetime and each morning’s a rebirth.
Each waking is to a new world.
To those that have eyes,
it is a new world.
So much to live in a day.
Such a gift untold to have thousands of them to endure.
As the tiniest piece of a hologram
renders an image of the whole,
we are the universe,
perfect in all its parts.
And if a day’s a lifetime
and if the river we follow is the channel of our true life,
then the riches we find along the way are
uncountable and endless,
from a mangrove leaf to a newly-caught fish,
from the dark shadows of the sea to the furthest star.
I.
“Not like it was”
the old sailor says
with his blue eyes bleached
by light shattering on water
like a shrapnel of rhinestones
on a cowgirl singer
fallen drunk from the stage.
“Not like it was”
not the lobster in the traps
not the shrimp in the nets
not full and busting out
like his body filled his T-shirt and jeans
in the days when a couple of bucks
made his pocket seem full too.
Nothing like it was
when Mother Ocean had as much to give
as his own Mama making picadillo
and key lime pie
and fritters from the conch
a kid could pick up
by the bucketful in shallow water.
When they could celebrate the killing
of a jewfish or a turtle
which would feed the whole neighborhood
because the Mother seemed to have
so much to give for free and forever.
Nothing like it was.
His bleached eyes scan the reef
which looks right back at him
with no forgiveness in its stare.
The corals, in their extremity,
expel their colored symbiotes
in their fight to keep on breathing
and bleach to the pallor of
a wan patient tucked into
pale blue sweat-soaked sheets.
Not like it was.
Who is?
II.
The polyps reach out arms
numbered like the suns
spinning in the galactic sea
our plankton planet floats upon.
His pale eyes search the horizon
to mark the weather moving in,
and in the morning he’ll be out
to fish again.
While the heart still drives the tidal blood,
the body cannot fail to strive for breath.
While the breathing tide brings food,
the corals feed and spawn in expectation
of their right to immortality.
Today will be someone else’s yesterday
and nothing will be like it was.
F
loat still. The sea around and the coral
beside you
Are not alien. Whereever you are in the
water is called Home.
You must treat it as your own powerful
family,
Sharing, as you do, the commonalities of
salt and substance.
You must ask permission to know it and be
known.
The ocean breathes, tells our longest
genealogy
Listen. It says,
“I have made this miracle for you.
This cradle of birth and life and death.
You can never entirely leave it.
You must cme back again and again,
saying “Home.”
No two waves are alike to Whale.
No two grasses are alike to Turtle.
It what a current or a coral does is
lost to you,
You are surely lost.
Find your way back on the sea lane.
Float still. The sea knows where you are.
Float still. The sea knows where you are.
C
hugging out the Northwest channel at dusk,
around midnight we have moored off Cottrell Key
the houseboat rocks in the rhythms of our
Mother’s arm,
we are blanketed with stars, the bright sting of the
Scorpion,
and a full Dipper tilting earthward,
we lay on our backs as children peering into the
universe.
This is the place we live.
The sharp slapping of fin flesh on water wakes us,
invisible leaping and roiling out there in the darkness,
airborn rays or flying fish, some alarmed prey
defying the tightening links of the food chain.
Slap, splash! Slap, splash!
A chorus of scales against the sea
waves glittering etched with moonlight
we gaze across dumbfounded
and find ourselves tiny as grains of sand swept within
this infinity of air and water that sustains us.
This is the place we live.
We fall asleep on the roof,
the full brilliant moon drilling our eyelids,
wind from the north rips over the waves
all night roaring savage lullabies into uncovered ears
and all night we awake to watch the constellations
wander westward chased by dawn,
the whole heaven swinging to and fro
rocks the cradle.
This is the place we live.
Solar winds driving the dawn
drive cold night from our mammal skins.
A kettle of vultures wheel over nearby mangroves,
but among them, one borne distinct from the rest,
twice the size, white head unmistakable,
vast wingspan a black crescent moon rising
steady he hovers higher, effortless yet all powerful
Bald Eagle surveys this country whose spirit
has been captured in his crooked claws–
endangered species, broken eggshells, dead chicks,
icon of America,
legislation, protection, comeback, comeback,
comeback-
The wings’ trailing edges ripple like prairie grass,
those amber waves of grain across America’s slowly
eroding heartland.
Eagle, drive open these eyes to see
straight through the New World Disorder
the corporate morgues and caskets of dollars
bearing our Mother’s body,
let all people see with your blazing yellow eyes the
other lives
clustered beneath your furious survival,
your furious wings beating against extinction:
the cormorants and mergansers full of selenium
the Florida Panthers’ crooked offspring muted
with mercury,
the glorious corals choking to blackbanded skeletons,
the seacow and sea turtle prop scarred,
great singing whales entangled in driftnet and
sickened in a poisonous ocean
and all the rest carry upon your mighty wingbeats
flying straight off the cursed dollar bill
and back into the wild heart of creation
where beats our common blood.
Carry this message
Our work is no where near done,
our work is barely just begun,
to save this, the place in which we live.
A test for the place we live:
Name the soil.
-Miami and Key Largo limestone, respectively oolitic
and coralline.
Where does the drinking water come from?
-Navy Wells on the mainland, drawn from the
Biscayne Aquifer,
pumped through one hundred and sixty plus miles
of PVC pipeline.
-Or, from the once freshwater lens beneath Key West.
Steeped in formaldehyde from the cemetary,
dosed with trickled down DDT from the Army-Navy,
saline infiltrated and seeded
with injected unmentionable bacteria and
stormwater runoff
all of which any politician in his deep pockets
categorically denies.
Name these three edible native species.
-Conch, custard apple, salwort.
Name three endangered species.
-Key Deer, Stock Island Snail, Key Largo Woodrat.
Point north.
How many days until the next full moon?
Where does our sewage go?
-Key West Wastewater Plant on Fleming Key for
secondary treatment,
no nutrient stripping, processed effluent pumped
directly offshore, next to the ship channel.
-Or, to a neighborhood package treatment plant,
raw waste mixed with chlorine, stirred and dumped
right there, in my bay, your canal and
speaking for heron, egret, kingfisher, osprey,
our estuary, thank you very much!
-Or underground, raw, into septic tanks, or cesspits
which fail
-Or down shallow injection wells where,
aided by the churning of the waves
effluent migrates through porous rocks
and in hours or a few days resurfaces in my canal,
your bay or speaking for fish, bird, heron, turtle,
and marine mammals everywhere,
our ocean, thank you very much!
This is the place we live.
On the houseboat,
morning broken over us we prepare to dive
and all the daylight details burst pulsing through
these human eyes;
Nurseshark barracuda, spiny lobster, eel grass,
gorgonians, eklhorn, staghorn, finger, star, fire and
brain corals, sandflats, flamingo tongue, sea urchins,
anemones, tophats, angelfish, parrotfish, triggerfish,
hog snapper, grouper, yellowtail, frigatebird, osprey,
pelican, egret, heron, man o war, sea cucumber,
phytoplankton.
The great web of being wheels over and below us
floating on the living sea w are woven within the
waves and come clean,
baptized back into our animal nature of skin and
blood, flesh and fin
eye to shining eye within the breathing of the tides
and weaving of the stars
This is the Place,
is the Place,
the Place
we all live
praise it.
D uring Reef Awareness Week, one of the most successful events was the Grassroots Activists Workshop organized by Dr. Pam Strother at the Universalist Church in Key West. The group first met in July, discussed a laundry list of environmental issues, and decided to meet on the fourth Saturday of each month to focus on one specific issue, beginning with writing letters in support of the No Discharge Zone for Key West.
The August meeting was organized by Pam and generated great momentum for the issue of improving sewage treatment in Key West, thanks to help from Joel Biddle and Robin Orlandi. The group organized a petition drive, helped distribute AWT Now! stickers, and called city commissioners, voicing their support for a comprehensive long term plan to upgrade sewage for Key West, including nutrient removal, replacement of the sewer outfall with a deep injection well (as mandated by the state) and retrofitting leaky city sewer lines on an accelerated 2-year schedule. Norma Schwartz, Susie Mitchell, Scott Carl, Paul Koisch and Carolyn Etshman all stuffed envelops on a Sunday afternoon. Laura Lee Wallaby, Mimi and Gary Johnson designed a poster. Carolyn set up an info booth at the Waterfront Market to gather petition signatures. Scott Carl alerted local media to cover the story of the sewage vote. Since there is a city wide election coming up, the issue of support for AWT was raised at candidate forums and it has now become a campaign issue. If you live in the area, you are invited to participate. If not, we welcome your e-mail participation, which is an effective way of reaching just about anyone.
Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has. Margaret Mead
N ow you can give coral reef presentations in your home town! Reef Relief is proud to announce that a Coral Reef Library is now available on a lend-lease basis to anyone interested in coral reefs. The Coral Reef Library includes a Water Resources Partners… we all live downstream Slide Show, educational materials, brochures and posters. The Slide Show retails for $45.00 and is available for sale at the Reef Relief Environmental Center & Store and on our website at www.reefrelief.org. You can either purchase the slide show or order it as part of our Coral Reef Library Lend/lease Program. So be a sea fan and start a local effort to protect coral reefs at your school, college, university or club!
The slide show was produced by Reef Relief’s Educational Coordinator, Joel Biddle, in a cooperative program between Reef Relief and the South Florida Water Management District. It features seventy five slides that show Caribbean and Pacific reefs and marine life, slides on threats to reefs, and slides depicting scientific and community action programs to save reefs.
The slide show had its debut at the Reef Relief/South Florida Water Management District’s Water Resources Partners Teacher Workshop that was held at Pigeon Key on May 8, 1999. The show takes viewers on an imaginary Pacific/ Caribbean reef dive. During the dive viewers discover what coral reefs are, why they are important, threats to coral reefs, why they must be saved, and efforts underway that can help save coral reefs. Current efforts by the South Florida Water Management District to protect and improve water quality in South Florida and the Florida Keys is described. Then viewers return to “the dive” to enjoy the beauty and stunning variety of today’s living coral reefs. The duration of the slide show is 45 minutes.
To find out more about the Coral Reef Library, contact Reef Relief.
