Thank Plankton
— after Coleridge
Well, they are gone, and here it comes,
the August sun, with the momentum of a rolling boil,
to blanch the greens and blues from leaves of grass
and trees and lighten boughs
by grafting absence where sap has stopped.
Already, the bright pink
flowers that bloomed last week
have given up, become the air.
I see bare patches where they were
as I drive home from dropping friends for
long flights home. When did home
grow walls of distances? When did
growing older become growing farther
in? I ride the traffic south and see the mass
of Mt Rainier as though a bulging god
had broken through. By now
my friends look down
at the many-steepled Cascade Range
of which this mountain is only one.
In their cups the close-up sun does tricks with light
on cubes of ice, cloud-shadows glass their hair.
Perhaps they are contented, suspended in midair —
There is such a twilight feeling in me now.
I’d rather greet an earlier day, go running
with Zach and Nick not from a thing or towards
just with, or walk the stalls
where Eleanor found the perfect dress and Xela
helped her into it and Oola wanted something else
and there was something else
and it was all and we were all
amused. When the day was a Strawberry Festival,
when the day was a parade, our bodies held life
like a loved one and we laughed at the sign:
If You Are Breathing, Thank Plankton
and though the man holding it was dressed all in red
it was not as a strawberry but rather a red tide —
that toxic algae bloom that comes from too much
fuel feeding too much little life. He’d come to warn us
but his warning was only a foul breeze
immediately replaced by a sweeter one
and we were like those teenagers whose lives ride
on surprising thighs, new love, new drugs,
new thirst,
who are unneeded and ready
to burst and don’t hear
the low vibrations of any warning or reproach
above the joyful water of their life,
their summer day, their everything rushing over them,
pressing and thrilling them together in the glittering
turbulence which is their life,
which was also our life,
but is not this one.