The Poor Atlantic

We spent time at the Atlantic shore every summer when I was a kid, and one of the sense memories I can still recover from that time is the smell of kerosene.  We used it to clean tar off our feet before we came inside the cottage.  That ritual seemed normal, like showering off sand or leaving starfish on the porch to dry.  Below is a poem I wrote two years ago after visiting Lewes, Delaware. 
It appears in Freshet 2010.



30 Lines about the Atlantic

You might think it’s like this big tub of pickling brine,
aerated and wildly churning, able to hold every exotic
and unwanted thing – parrot fish, behemoths, barges
of municipal waste – so vast, accommodating and
cleansing, that when you stand on one shore under
a blue sky and watch coquinas wiggle down into wet sand,
you see only goodwater that nourishes magic – God-made,
cerulean, able to paint bivalves with yellow and purple
stripes; wash jellies and stars, horses and urchins to your
toes; make pearls; fill a bay with moony phosphorescence.


But from that clean edge you sense there’s spoiling
going on: upstream pipes pointing effluent into rivers, sick
watersheds and dying sea grass, oily sediment. An Aquafina
bottle, caught in kelp. Ulcerated flounder. Hermit crabs
scuttling aimlessly in the estuary. Horseshoe crab shells
everywhere, their primordial exoskeletons collected, made
into doorstops. A BP tanker on the horizon. Syringe
or two on the island. Coral, oysters, blue crabs, shrimp –
exhausted from filtering the relentless sludge and metals.
Even the herring gull seems glassy-eyed and frazzled.

You wonder when this happened, when something so poetic
on its frothy surface got fouled. How the ingress and egress
of humanness gummed it up – laid down boats and planes,
concrete and diapers. Whether our trash might hold back its
rise and retreat with the moon; why we build where barrier
islands shift; don’t notice that the water’s warmer – sense
only how it quenches the empty spirit – clear and sweet, azul.
We feel how sunlight rushes over its surface. Think nothing bad
can penetrate our pores, that we can lift its sweet foam in our hands
as the hot dolphin leaps, as the tired snail closes its pearly operculum.