If you live in the West, you must visit
the Great Mayan Reef that runs along
the Yucatan peninsula of Mexico and Central America.
Not the largest reef in the world,
but it’s close—they say that less than 10%
of its species have been discovered.
Symbiotic polyps give the cities of coral
their hardness and color; the largest fish—
the shy whale shark—the leatherback sea turtle
with its eight-foot oily shell: that’s just what you might see.
You need to make a ritual of going again and again,
like that lonely father in that octopus documentary.
Within the brain-mazed cities—invertebrate countries,
and underneath the countries are continents of nerve cords,
the ganglia of first life.
Try to be still, even as the eukaryotic architects pulse oxygen
and unspool light all around you nonstop.
Will you be a good tourist, finning your legs
so as not to bulldoze the reef, so as not to write
new requiems with your clumsiness?
See the carbonate cheese puffs puckering at every turn?
Your dust-up could suffocate the algae feeding the coral.
Give it time: the tour guide—
who is also a Mazatec farmer, who whistles in the sea,
who moves like a seal—will help you.
“You’re here,” the steely cold murmurs on my skin:
“Don’t waste your wildness.”
One month after Christmas
at Kate’s Wine Bar,
we reunited under light the color of all-spice—
talked of Puerto Rico, New Year’s resolutions,
the sea swallowing your cell-phone,
even why the myth of Icarus is not such a sad story.
We drank Malbecs, then Old Fashioneds,
had tacos that were piled high
but lacked the flavor of the grease trucks.
We lost track of time and the bar was closing.
You had already held my hand in yours:
sun-nets draping anemone (sprouting thing we were).
We stepped outside to a lattice of snow,
weightless and hyphenating the blood-orange silence—
I stood before the thousand white hands, schooled
by the white-bellied trout axing the night,
or like a skeleton of a tree growing fast in the air.
No one knows how a tree marries itself,
how it gives succeeding rings in the stout, opal dark,
some sacred compulsion to spiral out yesses.
If I were deaf, I would see this glittering carousel
and still hear bars of Debussy come to part me
like a pocketcomb.
That year, I resolved to be better
at planning for the future, at accepting one,
at tweaking the instruments I have
to hear the irregular heartbeats of the lapwing.
Oh, how new to be kneeling
at the prayer of small happenings;
to catch now the tip-toe conjugation of joy,
like the blue-dotted grouper that ribbons out of nowhere.
In some jumpstart magic,
it eyes me sideways and then fades
into a kingdom of mouths.
I don’t have enough air to hold onto
this aquatic Biblioteca,
to read one more penciled grace on its pages,
and the blade of cold is cleaving me—
so I must come back again. Call it old love.
But of course, I bruise the coral and move the sand.
There’s always new life underneath life.
So here we are.
The universe did not owe us the goliath heron, its S-body
older than any calligraphy;
the stubborn spells against apathy within us, smooth as a nut;
the fact that when we eat the woolly skin of a peach, we eat its shade
and scarred chaos too;
the old couple dancing unoffended
to Frank Loesser’s “Baby, It’s Cold Outside;”
our trusting rattling breaths—
bony thank-you notes
lighter than a box of matches.
“Look at the slanting snow,” I said
under the gossamer lights of Main Street
before your lunging kiss was the swipe
that lit on fire our lives together.
Look at it: really look at it.
Jomil lives in Golden with his wife, Nancy Stohlman, and his 11-year-old son. Trained at the Writer's Workshop at the University of Iowa, Jomil is a poet, scholar, and associate professor at Arapahoe Community College. His Ph.D. is in Poetry and Consciousness Studies, and he holds Master's Degrees in English, Philosophy, Postcolonial Studies, and Communication from New York University. His poetry, short stories, and critical essays have been published in the Bath Flash Fiction Anthology, Vol. 7, New Feathers Anthology, Progenitor Literary Journal, Cobra Milk, the Modern Horizons Journal, the Journal of Humanities and Cultural Studies Vol. 3, Issue 2, and Peripheral Matters Journal from the City University of New York, among others. You may contact him at Jomil.Ebro@arapahoe.edu