The Odyssey of 7000 Plastic Ducks
Big blue
built burgeoning
towers of clouds, hurtled
hurricanes, smashed massive
muscular ramparts of water down
on oblong Trojan horses stalled aboard
warships wrestling with salty vehemence
to soothe humanity’s small aches: this once
for kids in bubble baths to squeeze and squeal.
One sudden onslaught of attack smithereened
the wooden flanks and scattered us all. Like
soldiers leaping off airplanes, we began our
buoyant fall upwards, bubbling, babbling
mere sounds of sea-water from our blub
lips of glossed luscious tangerine. We
broke water, wobbled as if reborn,
began our second epic journey, this time
the ocean’s, its big blue’s interconnected
motions, its vortices and volutes of emotions,
its chaotic commotions. We are a plastic army made
by semi-automatons armed with abused humans having
no allegiance to their abusers. We are recommissioned to land
upon far-flung littorals. We are corpuscles in the colossal blood
currents of the world. We circulate, spiraling the big blue’s bound-
less brain. Our yellow constellations on the azure expanse another
kind of magnetic rose. We are where those who manufactured our
plastic molecules can never be—far out at sea, seeing, feeling, and
undergoing sea change, schooled by the sea’s thinking in
livestream. If ever finding themselves in our predicament
they are doomed to die. We, customized by them to be
lifeless, are cells living inside ocean’s life. Witness
to ocean life: canopies of kelp forests, seafowls
eating after whales, bottle-nosed dolphins
doing loops. We head north to dying
ice or ashore with bleached corals.
We sleep with a Scottish child.
Walking Shoreward
Because the day breaks
blue and clear,
the seashore nearing
is a widening sash of glimmer.
Gulls laugh, glide, bellies bulged,
wings arched, alabaster.
I am rounding Buchanan Street.
Behind Berkeley Rose Garden
and Flower Mountain Monastery,
the sun is eastering, streaks
of phoenix flower and rosebay sucking
light from rosemary.
I think of yesterday, a sunflower
in winter, bowed but blooming.
The sun springs proud
of its power to arouse
everything: wild alyssum,
small yellow mustard, sea fig’s
fiery fingers praying in sand,
bladder parsnip’s delicate umbels
dry on tall bony shanks, blue-
frosted creeping cypress,
slanted pines’ hair hissing, swirling
inland. At low tide the soft, deep mud
glistens and emits a characteristic
—and not generally appreciated—
odor. Across gravel trails, marshes
are pitched into denser shadow
by slowly spilling splendor.
Chilly teeth of the littoral
landscape, glittering, bite deep.
Tidal breath brushes inland
ears raw to hear afresh. Marine
meters make lines without beginning
or end, falling or rising, dactyl
or iamb a sheer reef worn to nothing
by pulses of body and mind
tuned to the lengthening, shortening,
never breaking line, caesuras
not silence but sound
cutting into new timber:
widgeons, western sandpipers
chanting their own names
into new words. Plump-breasted
waders on promontories
popple passementeried wings.
Breaths of divers in and out of waves,
of bikers and runners sweeping
their tailwinds into the vast sanguine
wind of morning. Dogs, unleashed,
breathe freer. Short-haired sleek pelts
undulate as paws stamp paw-shaped
pools the tide, leaping further each time,
proceeds to fill with water, then silt.
To the east an eucalyptus
blooming creamy-spoked wheels
darkens to a shriveled silhouette
against the first fireball
of real sunrise, not preamble,
not smoldering foreplay, but
one opening chord that deafens
listening to a positive perception
of quiet. I hold up my phone
to take a picture of whiffled
marshland, monumental tree, azure
expanse and platinum portal
to the empyrean, but my vision
is invisible, swallowed by the sun.
The bay wakes behind
weeds, silt, birds and roads
and frets its cerulean
satin spreads with quickgold.
Lucie Chou is a young ecopoet whose work explores the ecotone between multispecies entanglements, spirituality and the magic power of language. Her poems have been published or are forthcoming in Entropy, the Black Earth Institute Blog, the Tiny Seed Journal, and the Ekphrastic Review. The poem “Holy Green, Sweet-Smelling” was included in Plant Your Words Anthology by Tiny Seed Press. Her debut poetry collection, Convivial Communiverse, came out from Atmosphere Press in 2023. She lives, reads and writes in mainland China.
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