The Tide Pool

Noon.  The mussels close, and sweat
seawater.  Barnacles shut.
A starfish abandons one, to seek the shade.
Kelp suffers.  The anemones
fold into coats of mucus and neither eat
nor fight.  This afternoon
beneath the gentle waves they’ll clone,
resume their battle of a hundred years
for space, firing poison darts
at each other.  The rock crab,
somnolent now, or the sunflower star
will eat the hermit crab who lost his home;
beneath a scallop’s hundred eyes,
minnows will leave the kelp for his remains.
Yet this is paradise: no storm
will tear the mussel from its rock, or crow
raise it to drop and break; the bears
and seals are only disembodied roars. 

A girl, lowered by her father, touches
a starfish.  Her eyes
grow serious at the sensation:
not wholly rough or quite gelatinous.
Some adults watch.  The aquarium,
state-of-the-art and grand,
which failed to revive the fortunes of
the Lakefront, is almost empty
as usual.  And therefore full
of emotions – not sentimental, cheap,
but free for the taking, like clothes
in front of some places
on the edge of downtown.  The child
cries out (the thing moved)
and, over her father’s shoulder, stares
through the glass wall
of the entrance at the empty towers,
the boarded storefronts, all
that unimaginable vastness.

Second Opinion
  
The girl at Starbucks,
neat, lovely, studying,
removed her earphones for a moment
and I heard, not the wobbly male
or the self-consciously souffrante
female I expected,
but the vicious dogs
I thought only boys liked … well, good
for her.  Now almost late,
I leave, and cross the parking lot.
Winter sun gilds
the windows of the Medical Building,
the homes across the street … one point five mil?
No, more like nine hundred now.
One has to take transcendence where one finds it.
The building is a box, its windows slabs,
but the style meant something in its time –
efficiency, liberation.
The houses with their silly lawns
are copies of copies of something,
but one can place some hope
in the children coming home from school
if not the schools ...
I like this doctor.  He’ll delay
coming to the point.  Some vestige
or home-grown image
of tact, consideration – a sense
that courage requires a stage, that it’s more
than embarrassment at the idea
of breaking down.  And that the flesh
is rude.  This parking lot
is as good a place as any
to wonder what slogan applies
at the end, what one can imagine
crowds raising fists for.  Freedom,
I suppose – always meaningful,
pertinent; always and everywhere
prepared to escape the earth
like a rocket.  Three.  Two.  One.