The seahorse
is a guest in our house,
-- from a student poem
In the living room
of the South China Sea
nuclear subs nose aside green shadows
angled like alien levers
while the stately seahorse, its tail
so casually coiled around seaweed,
an almost negligently affectionate gesture,
hovers in a world where everything
sways. The world is intimate
and nothing more
than the shadow of the submarine. The rocking
seahorse stays in place
because its hummingbird wings are a-blur,
below wheels of rolling waves.
We know the sea has been mortgaged
to Waste Management. We know it is urgent
we do something about it. And although
inertia traps us in lazy fear I wonder
about the seahorse-- what does it know
ornamenting the swaying, orchestral weeds
with its tiny G-clef body?
We answer its mystery with a category.
No seahorse knows it shows up in books
as a fish. And doesn’t know the strategic
geopolitical value of the South China Sea.
And so far as I know,
people don’t eat seahorses, probably the only fish
we don’t eat, and even if we did,
it wouldn’t bother the seahorse, the seahorse is calm
with a beautifully coherent eye
wonderfully camouflaged in flimsy leaves.
Not knowing it’s a Sea Horse, it knows what it is.
Oh yes, the male carries the eggs
because the female has two jobs, whatever they are.
She likes to be free. The seahorse is stately
in its palace of kelp. Everything is perfect
our own neurotic minds notwithstanding:
Can there ever be any natural thing we might contemplate
without reflecting mankind?
Thus my mantra of sanity is this:
The Sea Horse is a Sea Horse,
the Sea Horse is calm
below the leaping ocean where wind
tears loose the hem of the waters
unraveling them
as if they were a magic carpet woven with spit
coming apart in space.
Please take my hand, caballoito del mar
and guide me bravely through the trash
with your wide-open eye.
My wish is to see as you see
feel as you feel
touch as you touch
be as you are
if only to take a break from the bleak
outlook of what I know.
Help me leave myself
behind, on purpose.
I'm behind on getting ahead
anyway, so I'm going for a strategical
withdrawal for renewal. The Four Horsemen
of the Apocalypse are so old, such an old play,
I've switched their mounts to Sea Horses.
Everything is dancing
to death and everything
is perfectly perfect. It couldn't be
any better than this
there will never be any more that
than this, anymore this
than that, and the seahorse stays where it is
without saying anything
his wings going a mile a minute.
