Against Gregariousness | clivejames.com

Facing the wind, the hovering stormy petrels

Tap-dance on the water.

They pluck the tuna hatchlings

As Pavlova, had she been in a tearing hurry,

Might once have picked up pearls

From a broken necklace.

Yellowfin drive the turbine of sardines

Up near the surface so the diving shearwaters

Can fly down through the bubbles and get at them.

Birds from above and big fish from below

Rip at the pack until it comes apart

Like Poland, with survivors in single figures.

The krill, as singletons almost not there

But en masse like a cloud of diamond dust

Against the sunlit flood of their ballroom ceiling,

Are scooped up by the basking shark’s dragline

Or sucked in through the whale’s drapes of baleen –

A galaxy absorbed into a boudoir

And nullified, a deep-space mass extinction

Watched only by the Hubble telescope.

Make your bones in a shark family if you can.

If not, be tricky to locate for sheer

Translucence, a slick blip that will become—

Beyond the daisycutter beaks and jaws ---

A lobster fortified with jutting eaves

Of glazed tile, like the castle at Nagoya

Hoisted around by jacks and cranes, an awkward

Mouthful like a crushed car. That being done,

Crawl backwards down a hole and don’t come out.

-- Poetry (Chicago), March 2011