Maverick Poet Award Finalist: “Ode to the Coral Reef After Chihuly’s “Seaforms” and “Macchia” by Alex Gurtis

Ode to the Coral Reef 

    After Chihuly’s “Seaforms” and “Macchia”

1.        

Pure coral. Bleaching. Bleached.

Our children never got to meet

the colorful skyscrapers offshore.

Now encased in glass, glass bodies of the reef

rest on dark matter. Their forms conjure

underwater life but are lifeless.

In the absence of light, they are light.

In a universe of their own algae, they bleed

subtle blues, pinks and grays disposed

in the centrifuge. The optic molds increase

their thin lines of color, their body wraps

emphasizing their undulating form.

With the temperature rising, their color

vanished with the fish, unable to breathe.

Their orbs become our eyes, glowing

but they are deceased lungs and tongues,

where they and we melt like tablets

into regretful observers of purgatory.

In the absence of action, our understanding

is watching a loss become preserved as art.

2.        

seaforms 

           melt  

       300 colors 

                         into  

contrasting sheets

that smudge under duress

                                                human activity, seismic

glass coral shakes,

                                               blooming a thicket filled with flowers 

spotted with

                fire, 

                         heat, 

                          gravity, 

         centrifugal force 

each blot        

                                    the missing glassblowers’ eye

3.         Ode to the Coral Reef

Without the reef, there is purgatory,

layers of salt and water passing

light and dark back and forth as if it

were a salt shaker at the dinner table.

In a couple of generations, a diver

will float in this landscape, searching

for the remains of answers

on the ocean floor.  It is mid-morning

and the sun dips a beam into the surf

illuminating a passing sea turtle.

There is no heartbeat beneath the waves

only silence. Two creatures locking eyes

at a depth neither is comfortable with.

The turtle shoots off into the dark at 60 mph

leaving a jet steam that kicks up sand

revealing a little bit of colorful fungus surrounded

by a school of minnows. The transformation a synonym

of metamorphosis, the antonym of the end.

---

MAVERICK POET AWARD FINALIST “Ode to the Coral Reef After Chihuly’s “Seaforms” and “Macchia”

Maryland born but Florida bred, Alex Gurtis is a poet and book reviewer based in Orlando, Florida. A winner of Saw Palm’s Florida Flora & Fauna Poetry Contest, Alex is an MFA candidate at the University of Central Florida. His work focuses on how art responds to the climate emergency and inspires us to persevere in times of crisis. His poem, “Ode to the Coral Reef”, plays with form to mimic the life and movement of the sea forms depicted in Chihuly’s work, giving the Earth’s dying reefs life after death.