This is the third section
of a seven-part poem called
Solutions for the End of the World.
This time Maria
Prophetissa ruminates on seeing the feathered eel in her solution, and then
remembers a time when she was a child, knowing that giant eel was out there somewhere…all
the while, Goya keeps mocking the poem…
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| Alchemists doing their thing... |
Section 1 can be found here.
Section 2 can be found here.
3. The Alchemist Tries to
Understand What She Sees…And Then Remembers…
Maria
stares at the shadow in the vessel,
sucks in a breath, startled. What is
this?
Catastrophically widespread
die-offs of many creatures could be inevitable
if human activities
continue to lead to more acid oceans…
Is this what it’s like
to have a heart without
a
future, insoluble?
No future and so past
erased, insoluble?
The wind, the sun, the
rain, insoluble?
Goya laughs:
“Increasing temperature frequently
improves the solubility of a solute.
A paradox. What did she expect?”
Maria Prophetissa, Daughter
of Plato, wanders
out of the Alexandrian Gate of The Sun, down
to the harbor, image of the Eel
inside her eyes,
insoluble.
Melting permafrost from global
heating has made it easier for locals to
retrieve the remains of woolly mammoths…and
sell them on to China,
where the ivory
is fashioned into jewelry…
She sees the Pharos
lighthouse across the harbor.
As a girl, she stood
on this same strand, focused
on the sea –
how the sea-breeze lifted the boiled sun off
blown sand –
and knew that something would eventually rise out of the
green expanse
because that expanse was too great for there
not to be something as vast beneath –
the shadow of the sea –
and she would rise to
greet it, terrified…
In the past year, an area the size of
500,000 soccer fields has been destroyed
in the Amazon. Nearly
half a billion trees torn down…
She knows the shadow of the sea is the sea;
and that the sea’s shadow
is the shadow of the sea in the
eye staring into the face of the sea –
fish among ruins, cycle of desire,
anemones enfolding tiny darting
creatures into its body deep in the
sea’s rubble.
The calls of fishermen merge with the call of
gulls.
(The gulls, the black-backed gulls…cursed with one drop of blood
on
their beak –
first taste of life and so, first taste of death –
blood burned onto all their beaks by the
sea’s shadow,
insoluble.
Siren-red,
a red scream, mirrors the gull’s appetite,
how they
lift the shell into the clear blue, drop it
against rocks,
offerings to the sea-shadow,
white-winged
extensions of the shadow of the sea, insoluble.)
Goya shakes his head:
“This part
of the poem is shit! An alchemist
who sees the
great Eel devouring the world in the future?
A character who has the
long view? Are you saying you
have the long view?”
She
draws
the sign of Mercury in the sand, envelops that sign
with a circle that is
the sign of the Feathered Eel, eating
its own tail,
and waits for it to
rise from the sea.
More
than 200 reindeer have
died of starvation on
the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard,
with scientists blaming their deaths
on climate change.
Goya laughs again:
“This is absurd,
magical thinking,
invoking imaginary beasts to
understand the true beast,
the beast right in front of you…”
Tomorrow’s world will not just
be hungrier:
it
will increasingly face undernutrition. More carbon dioxide
means harvests
with lower protein…
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