That strange flower, the sun,
Is just what you say.
Have it your way.
—Wallace Stevens, “Gubbinal”

Three hundred times as heavy as our sun.
The Bubble Observer scientists report
buzzing and whizzing and gesturing in a ball
of swollen crimson gas burning standingl
ike a braintrust of firebrands and cake batter.

See the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
for updates, they say. This gubbinal—R136a1—sits around the house,
a rich tanned coot at the corner of Magellanic Cloud
and Shalimar’s Dowry, 165,000 light years in mystery
beyond the Milky Way.

The CN Tower casts its ex-cathedra shadow by day,
recently suited with LED lights, red and purple.
With the moxy of a junior vampire,
they stroke the shaft with abandon;
that is, aggregating the infrared of the city

and taking possession even as markets drain
the sweet sad drainage of abandoned wives.
A motive pure as sunrise, sure as sunset.
Watch the flick of green and greedy gold on a deerfly:
a glittering buzz we still don’t understand.

Don Draper

—after Lavinia Greenlaw

Moths feather your far gazebo
like young sailors on first leave.
You know something, and keep reminding me

of my own needs. You see an audience
of blooming heads and sugared bank notes,
and act accordingly. The swallows see it at five o’clock,

a Wolfman’s tragedy.
They hang themselves upside down,
handsome sienna prizes in the semaphore of bats.

Swayed by a summer night, I swing out
to your silk pocket square standing at attention,
a bird about-face. You’re the dark dew on the green grass of home.

Poseurs

The walking stick insect was a late childhood horror.
That July night, a squib on me from the natural world
scaled the wall as a vampire under the porch light,
ugly as an umbrella’s disrobing.
Moths, with brown wings the prize of
Asian fan-makers, pestered it like paparazzi.

Hoping to forget its awful likeness and presence,
I gave night-deep chase:
all twelve or so flirting shutterbugsre
grouped at the ha-ha,
honoured their lives were spared by a virtue of brevity.

That Peruvian familiar, a race almost entirely female,
had come down from the Morello cherry long after sunset;
after the plums turned the humid blue they want to be,
after trees sighed and inhaled the nearby jasmine, blooming
them nightly to dream-lives as smooth-complected date palms
for some caliph’s odalisque
or the low-stress Oregonian monkey puzzles,
a species whose softly-prickled, rounded shoehorn limbs
propose new varietals of orgasm.

Those giants, waving in their best Isadore Duncans,
know the poseurs well, the little stand-ups
fashioned after their mutineered twigs. Given half a chance,
the clowns would not walk at all, nor meander,
perambulate or otherwise imitate
Wordsworth or Nietzsche. Like the wives of 17th century
men of garden science, they loiter and loll
between vivarium and cabinet of curiosity,
dividing their time between joy and sloth.

So the tree.  And the wrongful
way the wind de-leaved it.
Down to bare bark and skid-wracked
branches.  But I’m exaggerating of course.
This is the law of all taking. Savour the small moments—
apples with their red out, skins glossed to luster.

SAMARITAN

I found a leaf the other day,
red and tattered on the sidewalk.
The wind kept lifting its
papery body every time
I tried to catch it.
I was trying to save it.
I had my reasons.  None
of which were particularly pure
or right.
Just human.

AFTER STORM

And then
a quiet so ordinary that nobody
knew the better.
Sun everywhere—
sky-glad birds and trees big again,
posturing
their dark loud arms over the earth.

MAY

In May, the flowers—beauty
rigged to stark-green stems.
The anthem of lone things.
Irises—petals crimped, yet a papery
lightness somehow extolling.
Grow tall.  Bloom/Die. Do not leave us.
Shake of deep purple against
the cold steel of fences.
So this spring eye can reap
or spoil.

NIGHT

Moon sentry in Elizabethan glower.
Orchid knife of wind coring night.  Flicks
stars out, one by one.  Tiny sparks that ignite
at the touch of dark. Frogs blowing their croaks.

FLOWERS II

The living chattel the earth.
Everywhere
flowers offing their colours.
Theirs is no easy story.  Rape of
pollen. Solipsism of bees. Propagation
unchecked.  They’ll see us through another
season.  There’s a field, close by, that doesn’t
let go of its flowers.

Poems can be complicated critters. It’s hard, perhaps impossible, to say enough about them to explain how they work or to explicate what they convey. There’s always something – much or little – about the poem that eludes paraphrase and exegesis. One can single out selected features; one can expatiate on the contexts in which a poem operates; one can point to what it implies. Then the poem has to be left to speak its own words. Or rather, some reader has to lend the poem his or her voice. Inevitably, a poem is performed, whether by a reader on a public platform, by a member of a coterie, or, most likely, by a solitary encounterer in the silent cave of the private mind. “Lend me your voice,” is something that every poem asks. Remembering, then, that no commentary is complete, and that all commentary, however helpful, distorts, I venture the following few remarks.

To mean much in few words has always been among the objectives of lyric poetry. In that respect, poets are not unlike physicists. Wherever you go in the large-scale universe, the simple Newtonian equation F = ma will tell you how hard you have to push to change the speed or direction of any object that possesses the mysterious quality of inertial mass, which is to say, any object made of what we call matter. A tiny equation with much to say. Moral philosophy has also crafted brief injunctions with wide application: “Love thy neighbour”; “Know thyself.” And the mind, usually considered small enough to fit inside the brain, has the capacity to comprehend the whole observable cosmos and to imagine possibilities beyond what observably is. The poetic impulse to concentrate, distill, and enrich, and thereby to reach far, belongs in the category of these other human compulsions and capacities to miniaturize imitations, and to reduce the large, complex and messy to something more readily managed and contemplated.

Report on Planet Earth

The men have been cobbled together out of second-hand lumber.
The women have been born under water.
The men are toolkits for prying open the outer world.
The women are searching for the eyes of things.

The women curl themselves around an undeliverable truth.
The men work by the edges of their senses
along jungle spoors white as the gossamer of old wounds.
After sunset, women and men alike sink into the blessing

of anonymity. They grow smooth enough to vanish.
Then it is the way it was before their puzzlement,
the way it will be after:

something—impossible to say what—pours
relentlessly through something into something.
No compromise. No fuss. No footprints in the snow.

What do we not know about the sonnet? It comes to us breathing the spirit of the Renaissance, the spirit of the autonomous individual, the inviolable value of specific occasion, specific anxiety, and specific movement of mind. It shares with the ballad stanza the honour of being our most recognizable lyric form. Eight lines, then something happens – we shift from complaint to praise, from invocation to celebration, from question to answer; a few drops of lemon fall into the tea – and a final six lines follow. Tension, then resolution. Eight to six: close to the Vitruvian proportion of torso to leg-length, according to some speculations; close to the ratio of the Golden Section (which is actually about 8:5) according to others. Printed on the page, the sonnet occupies a square, with enough white space around the edges to make room for reflection or for dreaming, for contemplation of what the printed words suggest but do not quite say.

I have written sonnets almost from the time that I began to make poetry. But one evening early in 1984 turned into something special. I sat down and wrote two sonnets. From that evening on, sonnets became a preoccupation. The kind of sonnet that I began to write seemed a natural development from the notes I had been entering in my journal, my book of ideas, for over 30 years – a more formal and imaginatively enhanced version, therefore, of a kind of writing with which I had been long familiar. In some sense, the poems that resulted compose the memoirs of a mind, and spanned nearly two decades by the time the preoccupation waned: puzzles, excitements, discomforts, as they seized my attention; interim reports on how the world’s prospects looked as of a particular day.

Sometimes the poem started largely as a record of a moment gratuitously bestowed. In other instances, however, the decision to write was the initiatory gesture, and the privileged moment was coaxed into being, and patted into size and shape, by the act of composition. I allowed myself to modify the sonnet form, to the extent, often, of lengthening the lines and adding extra lines, according to what I judged the requirements of the occasion. I dispensed with metre and rhyme on the premise that those ancient accomplices tend to bring with them conventions of sensibility, expression, and metaphysics from which, like most children of my time, I wished to be free. I borrowed from John Ashbery a certain freedom to shift the ground under my own and the reader’s feet without warning and without apology.

I also tended to assume a seamless continuity between the real and the imagined, and to accept disjunctions without blinking, as we accept as a fact of nature the unconformities in geological strata. When all these liberties are taken, one may ask, what is left of the sonnet form and its Renaissance belief in rational, dependable order? Though I freely admit an element of irony in referring to these poems as sonnets, the fundamentals of the form seem to me still to exert their influence, encouraging restraint and containment, and requiring the poet to come to the point without excessive dilly-dally.

Of the many poems produced under this prescription, the three volumes Midnight Found You Dancing, Strands the Length of the Wind, and Fireflies in the Magnolia Grove contain most of those that I consider worth the candle to reread. In these volumes, the poems are grouped in particular ways to suggest certain relationships among them. I rather like to think of them as randomly ordered facets of a polyhedron, a polyhedron constantly in process of extending the number of its faces. That polyhedron represents the wholeness, uncompleted and perhaps defiant of completion, that these privileged moments and their sonnet-embodiments compose. Turn it in your hands, from facet to facet, and read in any order, as few facets or as many as you will.

So This Is What

So this is what is called the surface of a planet.
How unlikely a chance to have found so tiny a cinder-crusted
ember in the amazement of space. But here I am.
I’m running over thin snow etched through by an underlying pebble-

field where each pebble leaves a wake in the wind, or from orbit
I’m looking down on what could be high-latitude fault-block
mountains. Either way, it’s incomparably strange to be alive, to be
confronted by such a dry, refractory facade, to be

at once so demanded and possessed of what one faces and so
detached, so indifferent to the charge and threat, so disposed
to flick one’s own existence off one’s cuff unexamined and without

regret. What I have come from is now an infinitesimal but still
bright and compulsively massive white hole in the darkness.
But there’s no going back: the source repels, countenances no return.

I’m still moving too fast. I must slow down and begin again
in some crouching posture to strike one stone against another.

I once met an art student, a sculptor, who was making rocks. Hard to make a rock, he said. At the time, I wondered why anyone would spend precious hours making rocks when he could have walked through field or quarry, by riverbed or shore, and picked up or admired for free any number of ready-mades. It was, after all, the era (1960s and ’70s) of the ascendancy of found art. Some decades later, writing the prose poems of Maps of Invariance, I began to get a better idea of what he was after: not just the finished product, but the experience of producing it. For I found myself trying to identify with natural process, assembling and modelling things that would have, in the end, something of the quality of metamorphic rock fragments – rocks marked with the accidents and transformations, the compactions, recombinations, crystallizations, of geologic time – an amalgam, in my case, of facts, inventories, speculations, anecdotes, allusions, theories, fantasies, narrative and expository sketchings, academic notes, questions, projections, taken up by a single prose voice modulating through a variety of tones, from detached to accusatory to elegiac to whimsical to pedantic to bemused to ardent to sentimental to visionary – an amalgam of disparate clips and tones that for all the apparent arbitrariness of their coming together would compose a suggestively ordered, or almost ordered, whole, a sequence that, beginning seemingly anywhere, and proceeding like a relaxed personal letter, a casual conversation, an informal lecture, or an impromptu reminiscence, would end somewhere welcoming and refreshing.

It sounds impossibly ambitious, and may well be so. Like making a rock, however, making such a poem is a salutary challenge, I found, and reading it – to speak only for myself – can be as invigorating as a wrestle in the surf with the shape-changing Old Man of the Sea.

A number of my poems, I’ve noticed, end, not intentionally, but by some sort of subliminal attraction, or by default, in or beside the sea. Having arrived at the water’s edge once again, therefore, may be my signal to say no more.

Selected Sonnets of John Smith

The World: A Hypothesis

The world blicked into being three minutes ago. Thanks
very much. Everybody comes loaded with a memory file
of what they are persuaded they did before that time. Historical
documents rank up in instant order. Libraries leap to fame

fully stocked. Fossil strata promptly presume to lie emplaced
as though a phalanx of dinosaurs dropped dead at the K/T
boundary. Quasars would have us believe they switched on 10¹⁰
years previous. And all makes busy rushing apart

at the Hubble rate. Whatever else it does,
the arrangement serves one end: to help us achieve
detachment, float free, realize the whole of the past

no more than a few digits jotted on an envelope,
and the future no more than more of the same,
cosmos a mote of dust in the eye, mind

a bouquet of aromatic molecules snuffed
in the nasal tract, and the inner life a cosy
enigmatic vacuole awaiting inclusions or occlusion.

—No. Stop.

It wasn’t three minutes ago. It’s always
the splittest second before you ask, or before you
think of asking, or before you know you don’t know
what it is—but there’s something—you need to ask.

Look.

At lightspeed the nightfield deepens, and we plunge
outward towards origin, scrolling back through time’s
aggrandizing entropy. Look there. Now you see them.
Now. You don’t. Fireflies. In the magnolia grove.

Nude with Stillson Wrench

This is not what you had in mind when you called the plumber.
Or is it? Is she that fleeing thought that pleaded for life
while you tapped your foot to the mood music on his answering machine?
Perhaps she’s been waiting in the bathroom from the first,

captive in holograph on the shower curtain, stepping forth now,
finally blessed with the opportunity to be of use. Except
that she comes too deeply mannered in the reveries of ennui,
the indifference to gooseflesh of one who has posed too long

while her arch accomplice laboriously erases and resketches
the sublimely elusive contours. She had hoped to use the wrench
to rescue from silence a wounded satellite. Just a turn or two

in empty space would have cinched the essential coupling, while she,
set in contrary motion equal and opposite, would have arced gracefully away,
rolling into the hammock of weightlessness possibly for ever.

What can one conceivably say to interest such a woman?

Only A Minute Fraction

Only a minute fraction of what is deposited gets preserved.
Much more is washed away again than buried.
Conditions have to be right, concentration of the solution
high enough, fall in temperature fast enough.

Otherwise, the collector’s hammer will have no cause to strike,
and the jagged result will be missing from its case:
there will a gap in the classification to be filled
by speculation only. Through such gaps imagination

enters the calculus, and, once there, itself becomes evidence
of lack or loss and of an urge to complete the pleroma.

Midnight found you dancing with a man unknown to the village.
Some years later you married him, and that, as it turned out,
was the start of another village, the one that survived,
whose children developed such a flair for colonization.

It’s Time to Talk

It’s time to talk regenerative braking, the dark
matter that may close a universe. As I die,
a conviction—call it, if you like, another illusion—grows
that failure of life here complements attainment of life there;

that rallentandos here are twilit sisters of accelerandos
elsewhere, kinetic loss is potential gain; diminished
actuality, a chance for the virtual to accent itself;
that gaps are invitations; nothing will be left empty for long;

or, since emptiness itself is another kind of fulfillment,
that imaginary space is vibrant with probability
amplitudes; that everything is wriggling: now it feels like me, now

something else. Life on the river goes on. It is the season of flowering
galaxies. Tomorrow I shall be unavailable for comment. Another voice,
not necessarily speaking a language you will understand,

or even be able to hear, will answer when you call.

Signs of Life Are

Signs of life are everywhere. The garden
won’t stop growing. When we turned our backs, moss,
heather, thyme, violets, forget-me-nots, and strawberries
took over. As gardeners, they’ve proved among the best.

The text goes on repeating itself: the walls
are made of it. The dead were the designated
auditors, but since we’ve ceased to believe in them,
it’s become a way of life for the living.

He’s the oldest monk. No one is left who remembers
when he first materialized at the gate. The finger-stops on his flute
are a sunny April evening after six days’ rain. He plays

his own hills and valleys now, woods ways, waters ways.
The sacred books are pasture rocks against which
his sheep card their fleece into strands the length of the wind.

Once It Mattered

Once it mattered that we find a way out of the forest.
We built these roads. The roads took us to beckoningly treeless places.
Yes, it was instructive to see the bones of the land clear of topsoil.
An age of geometaphysical innovation began. But all that sunlight,

unfiltered and untransfigured, unrendered into organic form,
proved unsustainable. A state of continuous illumination, so defined,
turned out to be little more than another version of the commonplace.
How many parsecs in the past was it that we had left the green

planet of our dreamtime? To hear again leaves close hands
in pathetic fallacy, to breathe fernspice and aromatic gums,
the will turned inward. Now there is forest again, and for reason,

empathy. Green light is god. In a million years, hardly a trace
will remain of the roads and their makers. The forest will be
a muted heaven of many voices, a few of which may still be ours.

The Story

The story of the young lovers began long ago
and still won’t stop. Even in his last hours,
the king keeps repeating it to himself. No one else
remains alive at battle’s end, but the story

goes on: the lovers have always just found
each other, are always about to trace the terrain
of tenderness, without benefit of time, with only
their hands, their breath. They never abandon

the central place, yet have easily arrived everywhere.

Birches all turn gold together.
Light fades, but fires feed on the dark.
Birches are green mist brushed on hillsides.

The old king rejuggles his bones, reaching for comfort
in last light. The young lovers encircle each other

in free fall, pure sky, beyond the ridge of everything.

The World: Further Hypotheses

The world is a hat. You put it on when you rise from the sea.
The world is an old shoe. You slip it off when you lie down to sleep.
At the vacuum’s ubiquitous centre, a speck of consciousness quivers to attention,
pinched in place by ardent arrays of would-be Platonic forms. A solo flyer

encompasses the globe, round upon round, humming a continuous filament.
Familiarity is the garment she conceives, repetition her métier. Continuity
of the discontinuous is assured by the presence of each in each. Here
is an orchestration of everywhere; now, an aspiration to forever and a day;

particulate self, one fleeting crick in the fullness of being. All things imply.
Beauty thus defined is not quite but almost perfect functionality. Failure to
replicate exactly is the secret; time travel would be otherwise impossible.

Much motion is required to support this stillness. Without this glove,
the lines of the invisible hand would have remained beyond apprehension.

We meet again by the ancient stream, we too who are so much running water.
Grasstips lick and lip the surface; brief and lifted, clear drops, shimmering, fall.

After So Long

After so long at ascetic distance, it’s hard to remember how once
a flush of ideation would start up from a kiss-print on a flank.
North or south from there it would butterfly, hedgehop, cartwheel,
beesip and barnstorm, accumulating aromatic vertigo,

touching down on a clavicle from which a cool vista spread for miles,
hovering over canyonland while grainy rivers ground their way through
varved prehuman centuries, scanning cavemouths for a first
thin hearthsmoke rising to challenge comprehension, or tumbling

into momentary velvet-sweet excesses of some woodside flower. That
was the era of canonic textuality, of classic plate tectonics, available only
within limited ranges of parameters, or earlier, the era of decisions about

what laws of necessity would thereafter apply—the pervasiveness of bipolarity
for one, and dialectics and erotic protocols that thence arise. It was spring then,
verging on summer, or thereabouts. It’s farther on in the cycle now. Initial

plantings are pleasant groves and stately avenues. The house, vacated,
has settled more deeply into weather, but is still maintained. The curious,
the jaded, the nostalgic, those seeking inspiration in the chapel, the music

room, the study where data assembled and defining resonances emerged—such
visitors as these pass through from time to time. Not you and I ever again of course,
but others will fall in love here, as we did ourselves in days before the war.

What is that little grating chink

in college girls’ voices, like the chirp

of glass marbles rubbed together

in a child’s palm?

It is some kind of hope

they are grinding in their throats,

a virus they catch from one another.

It is like birds that cock their heads

at the foot of picnic tables.|

They think it will fetch them something.

from Robyn Sarah’s Pause for Breath, Biblioasis, 2009

Always a wild openness

to the left and right of our path,

a humming in the high grasses.

What is it holds us to our course?

A pagan recklessness in my past

makes me conservative.

Today when I was reading on the balcony

a bee buzzed my knuckle, close enough

for me to feel the wind of his wings,

and all day long I have gone on feeling

the wind of those wings.

from Robyn Sarah’s Pause for Breath, Biblioasis, 2009

A well of the sweetest water

was ours, unsought;  we drew,

and we did drink.

But time went by –

we did not think

to dig it deeper, dig it new.

Our well is dry.

How shall we dig it deeper

now, with these aging hands?

We must not ask.

Strength will be given.

Turn to the task,

find in it heart to understand

what thirst has driven.

from Pause for Breath, Biblioasis, 2009.

fingertip. I later played it safer, seeking
corners that were curved or bevel, the better
to deflect attack, embraces and attention.

My predilection now is for the deckled
indents of a homemade page, fibre-flecked
and textured like a slept-in bed dented

from the press of its residents, a set
of lovers well fitted to each other’s
folding flaws, growing more attached each week

as they fade and sag and grey together.

DOE
To our eyes, she escaped
the sheer scarp’s face,
minced across pebbles,
high-stepped over stones,
dainty dame, down to the wet

rocks, where in a graceful
squat, she pissed: a silhouette
shudder, unaware of our presence,
tail a slight swish; against
the backdrop of the Basin’s

sun-struck escutcheon,
a motive blot, then
a breeze traitored our scents
and she bolted, that flash
of white tail a beacon.

OUT
Out with the garbage, the fag ends, the clutter
Out with the eaten, the worn down, the odd
Out with the beaten, the shuffle and sputter
Of words half unspoken and feet poorly shod

Out with the photos, the journals, the clippings
Out with the fucked-up, the fucked-out, the dead
Out with the drivel, the dribble and drippings
Out with the starving and out with the fed

Out with the baby, the bathtub, the water
Out with the lambkin and out with the kid
Out with the innocent, out with the slaughter
Out with the bum, the rummy, the skid

Out with the shit-stained, the ruined, the wasted
Out with the shot and the clubbed and the shivved
Out with the pinned-up, the plastered, the pasted
Out with the landfill of a life half-lived

WATER WORKS
Forty-some paces into the Gulf
you’ll find the work of forty-odd years:
rings of rock that once cased cottage wells
where dwellers drew fresh water, sunk now
in the salt swell and swum around
by fishes. We get smaller year by
year. The breaks we build to brake our shrinkage—
riprap and seawalls, baskets of stone—
only make things worse: they make the patient
ocean more resourceful. Gone Panmure
Island’s marram-anchored dunes. Gone the wharves
of Basin Head. Gone the elephant-
shaped rock whose feet we shod in concrete
to keep him for the tourists.

Jack Hughes! Jack Hughes! she wailed
at a white-haired man, Der WeiBe Engel!

whose eyes behind tinted lenses flicked
like an analog needle. Then he was gone.

Some say she was his other woman.
Some say her beef was with Guinness

(that black door marked with a toucan)
more than it was with him or his missus,

camogie queen and once runner-up
at the Rose of Tralee: Hurly Mary,

now best known as the mother of Gord,
that poet’s poet of the common man,

whose particular brand of strum and dang
can still be heard, from time to time,

the famous twang of that broken string
on There’s a Love Knot in my Laureate.

But things are better today. Much better!
Streets that once burned like phosphorous

are now prosperous. Signs everywhere:
Spa Wholesaler: Martin Loofah King.

Joomange: French, all kosher, safari.
Prosperous maybe, but still a bit shady:

note the camel-coat crewcuts in suits,
flipping through on-sale racks of thobes,

while a diva in burka winks knowingly
at a man sipping tea in Mahatma Grande’s.

“Golan shites,” the lot of them, says Lloyd
E. Dawe, the oldest retailer on the block.

But the old have a way of forgetting
just how bad it was back in the day

with the brothers Quixote, Don and Wiley,
two hard men—no soft centaurs these—

running a little behind from the Deli Llama,
selling it to all in tents and porpoises,

but strictly medicinal, the whole front
innocent as chasing rabbits with a hoe.

Innocence thrives where we begin.
My old self follows me around like an

idiot suivant, who knows only one thing
in this world. And how that thing ran true,

and still runs true today. A radical naiveté—
Oh little turd who made thee? Take this

couple, twenty-something’s turned thirty,
who have traded in their designer dogs

for an all-terrain stroller. Hi, Digger!
Hi, Digger, squawks their two-year-old

at an idling truck, a cement mixer,
while twirling a bead with chubby fingers.

His parents gape at him in astonishment.
And I gape in astonishment as well,

when behind them, exiting The Gap,
a dwarf in a three-piece pinstripe Armani

barks, like some kind of small arms dealer,
into the beak of a throwaway phone.

Queer to the fisherman her request,
when he would have taken her to a dance,
or out in a boat to the island of turrs,
placed her there among the puffy chicks,
her eyes hard and cold as a gull.

And calculating now on the beach
her stance, how to accept this gift from him,
how to turn gift into transaction.
Tie them with rope in a nylon sack,
a nylon rope—chain might be better.

Make do. One makes do in the field.
She looks back at the cone of coiled rope.
Looks for snags. Feels the heft
of the bag as she starts to swing,
rhymes to it with a rock of her hips.

Thinks metronome and swinging scrotum,
then laughs as she tosses it high,
watches its weird centrifuge as it falls,
its Hockneyesque splash,
the rope feed, slacken and curl.

Everything up until now has been
a rehearsal. Time now for action,
for the crab to cock a beady eye,
tilt its way across the sea floor,
time for sea slug, for conner, for lobster,

for starfish, sculpin, and jiggling tides.
In theory, three months work by these
will strip the harbour seal heads,
leave three seal skulls fresh from the sea,
cold and clean enough to lick.

But in practice, flesh clings stubbornly
and must be picked away with a scalpel,
a job the scientist will delegate,
not wanting to relinquish objectivity.
So in latex gloves, with blade and hook

the student help sets out to unsculpt
actual flesh from actual seal. In cotton
masks they face their subjects, their eyes
dark and water-filled as they inhale
the sea’s brine and onion smell.