Portrait in Veiled Waters

Even with the ice & wind

the night herons continue to stare out

across Mecox Bay

the lanterns of the eelers & crab boats

no longer flickering

in the moon’s gnarled reverie.

These nightbirds perch invisible

tightening their balance

on the porticoes of sleep

with the coots & fish hawks

water witches, filling

the deserted piazzas & basilicas of Mecox

they never cease gnawing

the surface knobs of its viruses.

This winter, the fiddler crabs, mud snails

& periwinkles remain

in the swales between the dunes

with the trailing arbutus

black pine, berries

& a new pale white parasitic vine.

We’re all expecting the storm

of the equinoxes & winter solstice

it will build up the dunes.

The shifting sand will increase the heather.

Years back, on the farm of John Hand

the shifting dunes buried

the abandoned whale boats

& fish wagons along the old beach road.

John Jagger’s beach lot

is still under the ocean

& the meadowlands

back of the beach at Sam’s Creek

now are in danger. Only last week

a few dune houses toppled

into the surf during a storm

& the old route down past

Mrs. Berwind’s bungalow is gone.

But it’s calm far & deep off the beach

at Mecox where very little changes.

Along the purple spine of the planet

The Mid-Atlantic Ridge

run the rivers of the sea

warming the basins, troughs, & canyons.

A long seamed, sloping flank of the continent

descends out there to abysmal plains

of boundless silence: past the marbled canyons

glistening with tunicates

& out beyond the Continental Shelf

in the crevices of memory

where our breath filters the dark waters.

Huge starfish prowl slowly

over this mantle seeking mussels.

The chitinous lances of mantis shrimp

pierce the chambered light

bivalvular siphons weep perpetual

vortices of swirling plankton

& in all the candelabras of sponges

all dreams become nocturnes.

The sea-cucumber’s parasols of red tentacles

float in this darkness

cooling all the caverns & recesses

of the moon snail’s presbyteries.

Here the ocean buffers

all rapid changes in mute piety

the only sound, a grading

of microstructural increments

within a molluscan shell

a growth of the prismatic layer.

There is a solitude in the coherent matrices

within the prism

as the electron-dense lamellae

at the terminal boundaries

lull over each other

dragging all the organic strands

laced with hinged filaments of amino acids

& protein linkages

across & down into the sunken canyons

down the eons, to comb

the rich bottom oozes

down where evolution takes all its time.