“While corals use multiple reproductive strategies, nearly all large, reef-building species release millions of gametes once a year in synchronized mass-spawning rituals. These spectacular displays allow the stationary animals to mix genetically and disperse offspring over great distances…. The generally accepted schedule is for branching corals (e.g., finger, staghorn and elkhorn corals) in the Keys to spawn two to five days after the full moon, about two hours after sunset. Star and boulder corals spawn six to eight days after the August full moon, about three hours after sunset.”
—Scuba Diving Magazine
“Those who have never seen themselves surrounded on all sides by the sea can never possess an idea of the world and of their relation to it.”—Goethe
1.
We enter in. We come to find
the million ways a universe can turn
and turn away again, implosion
and explosion all the same pink
wonder and fact. Life startles
itself into reproduction and we
suddenly touch mermaids again,
hear as swim the perfect song
one, two, three, four—then
nothing
Day Five—
six, seven, eight, nine, ten
the ones with flowing hungry hair,
deft fingers, breasts with eyes.
We enter in. We try
to enter in, imagining
our planet will survive, support
water clean enough to carry
creatures that create the reef
fragile as dust on a butterfly’s wing
too many fingers fondle, tear.
2.
What does it mean to swim
when swimming is the only way
to find existence that (if
larger beings do not intrude)
could last and give, enduring?
Like tiny spiders sprung from eggs
they burst suddenly into sea,
too many to name but collectively:
the New Ones Giving Hope. We
enter in. Stories of pirates surviving
crimes’ rope, living alone on beaches.
Bone to bone we know the small
beings that give us firm earth.
Beyond the dragons of ancient maps,
beyond where imagining ends,
cells come together into round
possibility of our survival: us,
the ones who need words.
3.
Spawn: the word leaves lips
full as a purr, a prayer, a pure
dream and imagining of all
that’s possible, all that is good,
for coral destroys nothing in its
tight need to become.
We know we have swum the same,
fast or slow, sperm or egg,
until our voices cried for breath
and our hands curved with full-
veined grasp, pulse the waves our
blood remembered, heart in deepest
sea. Salt shapes our wildest lust,
so many fear the chaos where
unless they grab they can’t control:
islands dying fast. Who are we
to sing out our need for God?
We have named too much by ourselves.
In the beginning, light and dark.
In the beginning, ocean.
With our stories (we enter in)
may we reach the ignorant,
soften their voices into listen,
turn them like a tide.
—
For twenty years Katharyn Howd Machan led a writing workshop in Key West, Florida, to benefit Nancy Forrester’s Secret Garden and parrot rescue. Year-round she is a professor in the Writing Department of Ithaca College in central New York State. Her most recent collections are Dark Side of the Spoon, A Slow Bottle of Wine, and What the Piper Promised, all selected in national competitions.
