Your face is boned with sponges' skeletons;
Maraldi angles & spirals, the tension
of your whole body in Brownian motion
until I’ve dipped you into solution

& you form a colony of anemones
I examine in a warm tidal microclimate. 
I breathe out swerving atoms, shaping
my lungs into curlew's wings.  Somehow 

I curl into the sum the spirals fly for,
square roots filling air with stars;
trapped at the back of anemone caves
surf clams spit red sand propelling them-

selves to places we believe in—when eels
turn our limbs to axes for infinite water,
a curved surface, re-entering
on itself & endless...everything is young

in this blue clay.  I’m an elastic solid—
you crawl, exhausting the lime in the water;
we grow hyaline, into another matter
traced by the birds' shape on thermals.

I feel like I am staring at the half-sawn carcass of a nautilus after looking up from chapter twelve of Kurt Vonnegut's Galapagos. The poem is more than descriptive with the eeriness of man becoming immaterial, (hyaline, transparent - you made me look it up) but not irrelevant. Some one is seeing, examining, crawling.

Interesting how the first quatrain has an end word scheme aaaa with out any "singingness".

This needs to be published.

larry

Beautiful. Just, well, oceans.  Pearl below is of special like.

Curious about the date....and I liked the mention of the curlew. Appears in many Yeats poems.




when eels
turn our limbs to axes for infinite water,
a curved surface, re-entering
on itself & endless...everything is young

In re: 2017--so many poems are set in the past--personal or historical--or in the ever-present.  Thought I'd set one in the science fiction future...

and to both of you--thanks for the kindest kind words on this...

Very nice piece, Eric. Congrats.

I echo the comments made above.  Amazing imagery and details.  The repeat of anemone gave me a slight pause; I wondered at the significance . . .?  But the pause was brief and the poem still much enjoyed.  Lynn

One of my favorites....

larry

You have exquisite taste, Larry.