Plankton

Deidre Cavazzi

Sometimes, the ocean is electric.
Bodies brushing up against other bodies
and singing blue fire. 

Feeding ground for innumerable mouths:
the tremulous first step of the food chain
sparkles like a billion jewels just off shore. 

It is said that copepods could ring the earth
seven times like a glittering necklace, their long
antennae and narrowing bodies paraded end to end. 

Translucent beings dancing in a drop of water,
ostracods and amphipods and diatoms like diamonds.
Things in a state of becoming: future crabs and urchins
tumbled together with sea monkeys. 

Luminous greening visible from space,
teeming tousled just beneath the surface,
seasonal seas and cycles of life. 

I can see why sailors in past centuries believed
in spirits and sirens and fires blazing up from the depths,
without a microscope tucked in their galley
to reveal the hidden players. 

A feast for leviathans strewn wide
across the ocean’s surface, miniscule ornaments
garlanded upon the currents, glimmering like crystal
in the farthest reach of sunlight,
rising and falling like breath.

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Deidre Cavazzi
Deidre Cavazzi is a poet and choreographer who can often be found wandering in the California redwoods or peering into tidepools. Her chapbook, carapace, root & feather, is available through Bottlecap Press, and her writing appears in journals including Roanoke Review, Soundings East, Polarlit, Plants & Poetry, Corpus Callosum, Crow & Cross Keys and Merion West. She spent eight years as a marine naturalist leaning over the bow of boats, peering into microscopes at plankton, rehabilitating seals and sea lions, and scouting for the breath of whales.