Bird Rock, The Marin Headlands
Kids think snow, but we know shit
when we see it, mason our endoskeletons
from calcium and carbon, mountain and volcanic gas.
We use what our ancestors had at hand,
how I would ski-pole-splint your leg in a white-out.
This is what waste teaches us:
we live in only one place, simple
as plankton blooms near the rock, given
what they need, salt of the earth at sea.
They drift their glass bodies, some turning, all
spinning leaves after sunlight, small windows
that never glint, but swallow radiation whole,
then are swallowed themselves. The truth is,
we eat our ancestors. That is remembrance.
That is how hungry we are. Upwelling
plankton narrowed into copepods, into carp,
into one pelican and back to shhh—
what we do every day; we become.
Bionote
Christopher Crew is a teacher, father and (extremely) amateur ping pong player. His poetry has appeared in The Sycamore Review , The Marlboro Review , Natural Bridge and Seattle’s Poetry on Buses . His work is forthcoming in mush/mum, Otoliths, of/with, and After the Pause. He is able to match a song to most any activity a two-year-old can dream up.