USA

lucyday@scarlettanager.com

SEA SLUGS

Oh, to be so unconsciously gorgeous!
Neither male nor female, but both
at once, clinging to a strip of eelgrass
in a sunlit pool on the mud flats,
with nothing to do except shimmer.

Orange and electric blue lines
mark head and back; fingerlike
projections glow with shining rings.
When two sea slugs meet, they fight,
biting chunks of flesh from each other.

Moon snails and ghost shrimps go
about their business. Death is common
as water; life multiplies like the stars,
then consumes itself. No one is sorry.
The tide glides in; clouds roll away.

Publication Credit: Appalachia

OF LIGHT AND LOVE

"Scientists bring light to full stop,
hold it, then send it on its way."
The New York Times
January 18, 2001

Forged in the ancient hearts of stars,
it shimmies through space
for eons to illuminate the sea
for the man and woman leaning
into each other at the end of the pier.

The sun floods Earth with it, too--
pure energy filling the sky
like a porcelain bowl
spilling minuscule beads
to bounce off petals, leaves
and the throat of a hummingbird,
into cone cells of my retina,
saying send the message
"like a red, red rose"
to the cortex now.

It's the reason for shadows
of willows dancing in wind
at the edge of a pond
and the product of two
bodies raised to white heat,
daring me to see
"a soul at the white heat."

Streaming from the moon's face,
it reveals two roads converging
in a yellow wood,
but conceals the Milky Way.

Two candles beating
like hearts in silver holders
create it from paraffin
and dark air--small
household gods
standing on the buffet.

Crammed with invisible color
or teased into a rainbow
singing in vibrant shades,
it's not time's fool. It always
wins the race, yet slows
to a stop in chilled
rubidium gas, disappears
like a stalled dream
or lost possibility
frozen in space, until
after years of experiments
and wrong calculations
you find warm arms
around you at dawn
and know you're done
running in place.

EARTH MUSIC

A humpback whale composes
a long song, low bluesy moans,
to impress a lady in Mexico.
His body is sleek and black
with narrow, scalloped flippers,
white stripes below. For six
months he sings for hours
each day, rhyming refrains
of pure and percussive tones
in theme and variations, A-B-A.

A rusty-capped marsh wren,
ready for jazz, lands on a sedge
and starts to buzz, then emits
a series of musical rattles,
matched by a neighbor in call-
response pattern. The first
wren continues in another pitch,
one hundred twenty themes
in a single jam session, all for
a woman to share some passion.

I place a CD in its circular tray,
push one button, and deep
in my brain, sodium gates
swing open, a signal oscillates,
jumping from node to node,
and nucleosomes spring
from spiral braids. Then DNA
ribbons separate, and oh,
those neurons sing, as I fall
in love like a whale with wings.

FLYSPECK ON A LOBSTER LIP

Symbion pandora, the size of a period,
perches on a lobster lip
and sticks with its adhesive disk.

A round mouth rimmed with cilia
could be the upholstery attachment
of a tiny vacuum sucking

food into pandora's gullet. A dwarf
male hunched on her back,
a female coiled within, she's strange

enough to claim a phylum:
Cycliophora, Greek
for "carrying a small wheel."

Every night Norwegian lobsters,
eyes wobbling on long stalks,
lips crusted with pandora,

scavenge on the Faeroe Islands,
grabbing dead fish and crabs
with their chelae, to feed

a microcosm populated
by creatures unlike anything else
breeding in the sea,

and every morning I swim
out of my dreams
into blossoming light,

and rise, hungry, hoping
to find a new world
on the tip of my tongue.

INSIDE MY EYE

Inside my eye the image of a dancing Buddha
forms upside-down
on the curved surface of my retina.

A sow emerges from her crown.
She wears a garland of shrunken heads.
She is golden and studded with turquoise.

In her right hand she holds
a knife to rid the world of false selves
and things, and in her left,

a skull bowl filled
with blood and guts she would turn
into milk of enlightenment.

The dancing Buddha hangs
from one foot, looking out at the world
through my pupil.

My eyelashes are a forest
of bare tree trunks leaning in wind;
tears pool around flecks of dust

on my cornea, creating a sky alive
with stars that explode into supernovae,
sending photons whizzing

toward my retina, where the Buddha
tilts her head, listening for grace notes
as brightness begins.

"The poems above are from INFINITIES
(Cedar Hill Publications, 2002.)"

© All Copyright, Lucille Lang Day.
All Rights Reserved. Printed By Permission.