the gulf of mexico
2800
Engulfed
This sea is silent
Not completely dark but silenced
Muted silty depths that hold so many
Secrets and lies
Lie to me now, ancestors
Tell me, and Skelele
We can save us from ourselves
Tell us why
People never listened
To the seaweed
The bones of fish, and trees
The rivers’ complaints
Why everything
Became nothing
Not a sound
In this dead zone, dead water, breathe life for us. We have sealed our segments and are travelling like light through the airless gulf. Buried in the mud are miles of extinct container ships and mega tankers, seeping metal. Our tattoos glow faintly, leaving streaks swallowed by algal bloom. Blindly, but guided by temperature and rhythm, we rush with submarine waves, rolling to meet the waking boundary. Why this test and why us?
Read to me
ancestors
with your rolling tongues
read The Book of Sediments
aloud, and break this silence.
Is this where land animals
followed food
and became whales?
The coloured muds
of continental foundations
the reds, greens, blacks, and whites
that feed our silica shells?
It is too dark to tell in this endless night. A darkness that is as old as the sea itself, you say. And so how is this deadness different? Because it is, you know I can sense that. Even Skelele can.
Tell us quickly.
I am pulling him now, his tattoos are weaker, and we are slowing, slightly. Hahom, thank you for lifting us with another deep wave.
Sliding above the sea-floor ooze, curl us with the rhymes of climatic times, icing, melting, icing, melting, rolling with loads of silt, sand, gravel, rock, glacial sediments, warmer layers, shifting with all that has happened in the waters and the skies and land. Keeping only sharks’ teeth in memory.
Whose memory?
Deep water heritage
take us out of this.
It is in me
and I carry it forward
in Skelele too.
It is ours to read
to listen to. Ocama.
Soon, soon, we are rising now, lifting past patches of ooze churned with us, slicking, thicker. An oiling is with us. Creeping.
Suddenly a whale shark shadow engulfs us, drags us in undertow but can’t hold us. It turns and heads for us again.
“Our naniki attacking not guiding?” Skelele manages.
“Everything is dead.” The flower-garden reefs are buried, oil patches congregating.
Hurry. I hear, as the ghost of the whale shark
tries to swallow again.
Is it chasing us or trying to save us?
Behind us flames lick the surface, and the glow is spreading underwater. I pull Skelele closer as we roll toward Cancún’s “nest of snakes.”12
A seething, glittering mass of packaged junk food merges with Isla de Mujeres and clogs the pylons of a bridge ahead. Connecting Cancún to Cuba, the bridge strains the food basket of the Gulf, but is only filtering the worst.
Fires on the water look like the distant cities
in smog.
We can’t tell the difference.
Gone is the Gulf Stream’s cleansing now, as we push into the plastic mass, deeper, down, bracing. And as the junk thins, we feel a way through the wall of sludge and push.
A give, a flooding rush, and we burst through the legs of the guardian bridge of the Caribbean Sea, with a glut of expired food and dead fish, into blue waters again. Hahom!
The sun is rising, and I flip and spread my sections slightly. Skelele tries. Clumsy.
I pause.
“No time, Amana, come on!”
I must check. The water says there are none, but I want to be sure. What if we are supposed to find them and bring them to safety? I swerve. “Maybe the Ke Ara’s sculpture reefs have naniki. There has to be …”
“You are not a saviour. Come on!”
The junk is spreading out, naniki carcasses sinking, as the sky gets lighter.
There, some cloudy shapes, deformed and murky, are the lumps of lost reefs.
Shipwrecked a wreck, a wrasse, blue- or yellow-headed, a coral’s hope — mankind’s litter lair.
Believe the trumpetfish disguised as a tube sponge, the gorgonian waving. These were the last reefs, and sculptures sunk onto barren sand beds were also havens.
Coloured with the slow growth of unsuspecting elkhorn and fire coral, wreck reefs lay like ghostly reminders of trust, and life.
Instinct thriving beyond death and reason.
A coral’s hope then.
Did we hope to heal this way? With leftovers and interventions to “save our seas”?
“Save,” a soundless word embedded
in our survival cells
a soulless cry bouncing maniacally
from north to south
echoing shamelessly on ravaged plains
rallying dust storms and hurricanes.
Save a wreck, a wrasse, blue- or yellow-headed, a trumpetfish’s sense of predatory triumph.
Made by people or not, lost. Nothing. I shoot past Skelele like a striking eel.
“What the … wait!”
“Wait? Wait? Catch me!” I’m way ahead but a net of the plastic packages sticks onto me, trailing. I try kicking it off. Bits attach to Grand Cayman island as I power on.
“Your dress. It’s catching!” Skelele shouts, howling in laughter as he slash-skims, trying to keep up with me.
The plastic shimmers with sunrise colours like a sparkling skirt and I finally free myself. I can feel my chest tattoo glaring.
“Ah-ha!” He hurtles past me.
“Not at all.” I torpedo past until I am almost out of his sight, not quite.
My parrotfish naniki in me is changing. I feel the flex of her guidance becoming male. It’s okay. I don’t need maleness to be faster than Skelele, but I can show him.
I am on the edge of the drop into our deepest Caribbean blue, just off Little Cayman. I wait for him, flexing the difference in me. Will he be able to see it? This blueness is quiet up here, but there is life below. Life before life.
“What’s up with you?” He’s staring. “How you do that?”
I circle him and he turns to keep looking. I roll, showing him my now identical spinal tattoo. I am as male as he is and almost a mirror of him.
His colours are confused, rippling. Mine too.
“Because I can. My parrotfish changes gender and so I can. When I want to. But don’t think that I had to, to be faster than you. It was after I beat you, as a ‘girl.’”
He dashes at me, and I head straight down. Down. How deep can he chase?
Bibi, I know, Mother. I should listen, but we are almost back with you, let’s see.
Straight down Eagle Ray Pass, I’m dropping, “cage diving,” and he is on my tail. Black water sounds, there they are. Skelele locks his fin on to mine as we plummet into a blue as deep as his night sky.
Ahh, the crackling of snapping shrimp, sizzling and popping as the pressure squeezes.
descending
in this twilight zone
going beyond blue
peace
a blanket of strength
compressing us
into our best selves
going home to meet
the Last Universal
Common Ancestors
we close our eyes
our gills, our cares
as we sink
dreaming head down
like sperm whales
surrendering
the sounds expand
a howl, a hollow squeal
is caught
in the blanket
that crackles like fire
life before life
down, beyond twilight
Show him, in his dizzy chest, how it feels, the downward drift of specks. The tickle of the constant fall of flakes drizzling through our depths. Never-ending. The endless soft rain of lime shells, diatoma, ash, and dust from his deserts.
Show him the magic of its drift
tinkling through us.
This bliss is my heaven, but Skelele feels it too. Our fins flicker like our darting colourless shrimp naniki. Space travel into a darkening and ever-expanding galaxy. Flecks like stars and strobing ctenophores flashing gelatinous neon. Siphonophore strings of dancing plankton make floating masquerades. A velvet rope with translucent rattlesnake tail, uncoiling slowly. Another a glittering tinsel-fringed unformed moko jumbie, or puppet, suspended and flowing with invisible strings.
Never mind the viperfish with teeth caging its face or the gulper eel’s hypnotic wriggle through the dark. The vampire squid spreads its dusky bat-skin umbrella and glides by, a glob of blue copper blood, with its all-seeing glazed marble eye.
Plummeting. Is this like the steel drill boring down, down, ever deeper, farther?
Past the ghost shark staring cataractly at us through the dark. I can smell the whale carcass in the thick brine pool over there, feel the writhing eel and frenzied feeding vibrations.
Each cell of the ocean ends its life here. Ashfall. Plankton sediment building limestone, underwater mountains and plains, or tucked in a crevice — turned viscose and black — the “gold” that Earth People seek. Cellular oil so ancient and buried in the body of Atabey, her blood — an elixir for humans long disconnected from their resting place and home.
Rest with me, yes. Just for a moment because eternity is a moment here, where nothing matters, no beginning or end, where everything is suspended, weightless.
Blackout.
Dead volume.
Our counter lungs.
A warm gush is bubbling now and Skelele stirs. We curl a little, as the hot spring streams upward. Its heat licks like flames, black “smoke” billowing up in a plume. We rock with its warm ripples, still drifting, slowly, slower.
We rest on seabed near the gaping mouth of Atabey.
Thousands of deep-sea crabs, squat lobsters, tube worms, and shrimp naniki clamour here, crowding the mouth and limestone lips that are belching, breathing, thermal venting diluent gas, filling us with nourishment. Prayer in motion that we see without light. Molten core mineral food, kai, for our strongest selves.
Make me like the yeti crab, farming food on my back, or the giant tube worm waving heated energy into nutrients in itself. Give me the Pompeii worm’s magnificent bacterial aura to bear this heat.
Feed with us, be with us
here between submarine volcanoes
where we diversify to survive
where our first ancestors thrive.
Their hum, through our segments, is magnificent. An ancient vibration stronger than praise. Propelling. Go!
They shoot us up faster than bends. Sulphur-bubble exploding light, the invisible ones send us back on our way.
“But I couldn’t see them!” Skelele claims, as we zoom into bright blue again.
“Oh no?” I am my she self again. “I guess you couldn’t feel them either.”
Skip breathing, oxygenating.
“You are shining,” he says.
“So are you.”
And as we surge away from the depths,
BOO DOOM BOODOOM BOOM!
BANGA DANG. CRASH!
Deafening waves through our bagua.
Our eyes lock, daring each other to ignore it and NOT follow our instinct to find out where the racket is coming from.
Agreed.
We head in unison toward the din, shuttering ourselves in readiness. A knot of pipes vibrates in cloudy water at the base of an island, ringing it out. On the surface, a tugboat pulls a barge, heavy with sand, along the horizon to the island. Maybe this island eats sand?