pulchritude and multitude

by Allister Nelson

feel the fractals of a pelican wing, senses drowning in ripples upon the Chesapeake, the briny brackish waters like a fawn’s shaded eye.

in the sun, a turtle, clawing slowly on muddy stump to find some semblance of light. the Piscataway said mother turtle carried dirt on her back, wet and slick, up to the trees and upon her the world was made. to think, we are all aboard a vessel of tortoiseshell, slicing through channels of time.

breathe.

the salt, the sweat, is what makes you immortal. it is not blood, but water, that carries us to the waves of the Atlantic.

feel.

can you pulse with the currents? is there space in this elegy for the catfish, burrower supreme? I cast a lure and reel in soprano song of red-winged blackbirds upon the fluting reeds.

pan pipes, drifted from the Great God of Wilderness, across a whole ocean, up swelling rising tide, to carry me to the feet of Annapolis on pagan windworks.

nature is, nature isn’t.

what but for a hot July day breathes truth from tobacco pipes on drift lines? crab pots tease tangles of seaweed like maiden’s hair fern submerged leagues

below. the blue, the white, the green. arachnids, no, crustaceans, no, what we feast upon and what I watch devour its young.

all predators pay their due.

I caught a crab once when we went trawling. it ate the other life at the bottom of the lukewarm bucket, on that maiden voyage of searching teenagers across the Potomac. eagles had returned to Mason Neck, there were breeding pairs of America’s bird and osprey over the water.

I wondered at the tenacity, the vileness, of the crab.

swallow.

swim.

in the waters, abyssal womb, once there was darkness, and Trickster lit a fire upon the Deep. maybe god figured in, maybe She didn’t.

(when I envision heaven, I think of beaches of cod bone and seas of tears over the dried fish.)

the line jigs. I have caught a shad. its fish-belly white scream. like lung tissue flayed into sashimi butterflies.

sometimes I think I am caught hook, line, and sinker on this wanderlust life, watcher of waters, sentinel of stone slowly being eaten away at by the pounding motion of Great Falls.

I gut the mercury poison of the shad. intestines spill onto the dock.

inhale, don’t squander a single drop of the fishy blood.

we become what we eat.

in time.

but time is not enough, and the melody of the reeds stop, and the pelican grabs the shad straight from my hands, and the crab pinches my toes, and the sparrow demands tribute, and the waters

drag me

down

so I join Mother Turtle, and I too dive for matter like the Great Angel of Death Izrail did in the primordial deep.

we are all reaching for something, from the jewel on Leviathan’s crown

to catch a bit of sunlight on water.

breathe.

sip.

(blink!)

Click here to read Allister’s bio.