On the Mechanics of Fluids

 

 

Fish Do Not Dream

 

Dreamless fish

In the oily deep.

 

 

Death by Drowning:  The Climbers

 

Drowning on mountaintops,

Dreaming of the deep,

Swimming underwater on snowy peaks,

In thickest ocean.

 

Breath fails;

Fluid fills the lungs.

Drowning in ourselves

On a floating world.

 

 

The Petrified Sea

 

Verdant imprints

Of a time gone by.

My home was once a shallow sea,

Dividing a continent.

 

 

American Nile

 

Muddy stream,

Channeled for untenable oases,

Glittering fountains of the desert.

 

Hoover, two million horsepower for two thousand years.

Concrete finally curing in five hundred.

Years of overwhelming time

Shall pass away

Down rivers to the sea.

 

-- John Solter

 

 

 

 

 

The Inundation of New Orleans

 

Nature in Stalinist precision.

Levees and ramparts,

Great pyramids to progress,

Defiant walls against reality,

Monuments for a time,

Break on the fat tails of bell curves.

 

Floods lift up their waves

Against the koan of drainage basins

In blind reservoirs.

 

A void dug in water,

Atlantis erased.

 

Water trapped in salt.

Life arteries pulse fresh.

 

 

Lake Vostok, the Seventh Continent

 

Ontario sunk into another world.

A glacial mile down,

Life exists.

 

 

The Dry Valleys

 

Clear spaces

On a continent of ice,

Antarctic oases.

Two million arid years

On the tundra of dreams.

Marble canyons polished by immortal winds.

 

 

A Night and a Day in the Deep

 

All that is unremembered in the oceanlands,

In perils of the weary and painful fastness.

Reading seaweed spirals in the fourth watch of the night,

From a driftwood castle.