Sugar Kelp
Do not go gentle into that good night—Dylan Thomas
Sea garden
of green lettuces, red mosses,
brown
ribbons of sugar kelp caterpillared
just below
the surface, spooling spores
around
rope, above tiers of mussels, oysters—
the new
farm, where hunger wraps as it grows,
eats
poisons of land and air, while an old man’s
bent head
gives years to a bed, his hopes
to the
cove, the return of the herring
folding
into flakes of skin, white powder
of Gold
Bond a daughter applies for him,
keeping
him at home, and the caregivers with
bird
names, Phoebe and Robyn, who come
mornings
to wash him as sugar kelp is washed
by the
waves, as it washes what the sea has taken
into
itself. All
Rise, say those who escaped
the
firing on the beaches of his war laid down
inside
him, near-cleansed, near-resigned as new
fishing
ground, where no hook, no catch,
only
soothing of a daughter’s hands, until
she moves
his lighter away from the oxygen tank,
and his
pipe, his habit of reaching to ignite it.
He’s
slid down to the foot of the bed, one leg dangling
the
rail, blankets bunched beneath him.
“Can you push a little with your feet?” his daughter says.
“They don’t work anymore.”
She reminds him fishermen now farm the waters
he’s spent a lifetime minding. “Growing sugar kelp.”
“Seaweed,” he says. “Algae. That stuff?”
Letting go of the buoys, his dories, the ocean and its scales.
Judith Janoo
