Marine Snow

The memory of sun, it is what they subsist upon

down where the jaws snap blindly

at whatever passes, where drifter is a meaningless term

and to hunt is to proffer teeth and tongue

and ghost-lit lantern

into a sea like liquid wind,

without prior compass

of the way the wind is blowing.

Should they be gifted with a corpse

whose half-spoilt flesh holds distillate

eternal summers

spent glittering in the euphotic zone,

they will give gross thanks and, in their way, be holy.

In the cartography of sea,

they are kin not to dragons nor the Stella Maris

but to your own bright band —

yes, you there, eating your sunlight secondhand

from a long-gone grocery display,

drinking it from the guts of lazy lemons.