ABSTRACT
for Antonia Strand and John A. Williams Cold-blooded in warm waters, my Nurse Shark basks along the bottom under My underbelly. She slithers unconcerned Through corridors of coral. My snout is glass. I do not thrash To get attention or away. Bulbous- Looking in her depth, boneless, She muscles the fear of death Into our territorial waters. Come dive with me. The Nurse has scared away The Triggerfish, Grunts, and Sergeant Majors— But we are bigger swimmers, who have so long Glided coolly among man-eaters That we do not panic. You and I and it Will skim the living reef in a froth. Great bouffant mounds of coral grow Gardens of spines and swaying stalks And in grottoes we shall glide to With a swirl of fins, ruddy Contours like faces and bodies flower In the plankton-yellow sunlit sea. Here are the violet fans of summer. Here are domes of green brain coral. This is the jawbone of a politician: Scrape to his memory, big And fractured as your ambition. And these are jawbones of ministers. This thigh-bone of a foreigner, 227Chrome-plated for its greater glory, Was partway melted in the tropics. The President's brain breaks up like coral And floats in slow motion beyond An umbrella open in the sunlight Of a chilly windy day. The assassin James Earl Ray, Flashing another twenty, flourishing In the splendor of speculation, dances With sleepy eyes around the world. His chin and shoulders low, his elbows Back, Robert Kennedy swirled Out of the crowd in the ballroom Toward a grieving mystic Boom! Boom! You glide in the air with the ocean Stroking your belly. You slide As an airplane over the feeding villages, And swoop across the lowlands where they grow And die; they lose their iridescences In the dangerous night. Behind you swims The body politic sidewinding Sluggishly but with a feeling For too much movement anywhere. She has been known lazily to circle, Then smack a man with her bulk And the teeth of her sandpaper hide. You will be raw and panicky, No matter what your courage, when your Nurse Shark Opens her prehistoric jaw and lunges.
