Terrebonne Bay

THE DEEP EVENING-COLORED ROSE of the sea

is closing. Sweet crude oil, orange as rust,

finds an open pathway into the marsh.

And what you thought would be your home,

lush with grasses, is no home, drives you out into the gray-glazed

gates of sleep. Blood flowers

where we don’t see it. And every chance event

is a high note racing from stars in sea-depths of brightness,

and every shock we feel we feel only with the slack

ropes of our arms. Someone

wants to hide the body of oil and cannot.

Someone wants to hide their hands from shame.

Shark, dolphin, manatee, fish,

each slick skin an undreamt tine threading its red

flute-dusk through fumes.

Sound of the flood-dark pulse.

Then the second when the water makes no sound.

THE OLD VANDALS WERE FLOODS AND BOATS

eroding the banks. The islands that once dotted the bays

have sunk, disappearing into silverish grit, thinned

into algae and filament now being made

quiet by plumes. Despite ourselves

we are made quiet. The death of the sea

a thing we must lower ourselves into

to imagine. I will stay with you here

inside the sheen of orange that quickly kills,

not like the saltwater slowly starving the freshwater-

marshes and grasses that knit this green-wet

world together. The two breathless gannets

found covered in oil are not unlike you,

at the mercy of a mercy that moves in plumes,

that insists certain fates remain

invisible. What existed before the oil arrived

was delicate and mired, a broom of moonlight

swept through half-choked waves. I trust you

if you wish for what it, too, might have been.

LEADING INTO THE BAY are soft green expanses of

grasses, saltwater channels, slicks

not glimpsed here before.

The birds bathe where they can,

in half-damp shadows that make possible the next free

climb into air. There is nothing beyond our means to feel it—

oil pushing up to the surface where the surface-dwellers die,

turtles pulling in from the Gulf for nesting.

If I close my eyes I can hear the faint blue

traces of blood over-gathered by oil

and the sound of ice near the seafloor.

There will be a time when nothing living moves,

a degradation of stillness beyond any liquid scar.

Still, the solutions of despair are weak

if you believe you can touch an undersea reef,

the belly of a small wounded whale.

You have the power to feel it.

The breath of the animal

moving like trust into your arms.

BEFORE THE HOUR WHEN THE COAST slid into ocean

we thought we saw a patch of sun greening in waves.

The slip of a fish. There was a need

so deep in our bodies we could not even weep.

We called for an end and that end

did not come. Power after power, our machine tools

and cutting tools did nothing to hold back the brown clouds

rippling in chaotic columns toward the light.

And what the skies mean, passing over beds of tarred

seaweed, feels unutterable, like the darkness

around a candle. Where had we hoped to live?

You came into the month with dreams.

You walked on those beaches even though

you knew they were sick. The bird that sought

the reeds to die in, the fish gill-soaked with oils—

you gathered them into yourself as if you alone

could bring back their flickering.

And overhead the novae exploded toward you

along tracks of gas and dust, and the fields of ocean

rose into you, and the crabs broke from their cancer fossils

in masses of tiny flowers and you felt inside you

the islands re-arise, flushed from the thickening

imbalance of the earth. (Is there some

refuge beyond ourselves that is vast enough?

The sea is without grief. As are the days.)

Copyright Credit: Joanna Klink, "Terrebonne Bay" from Excerpts from a Secret Prophecy. Copyright © 2015 by Joanna Klink. Reprinted by permission of Penguin Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.

Source: Excerpts from a Secret Prophecy (Penguin Books, 2015)