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
Muddy stream,
Channeled for untenable oases,
Glittering fountains of the desert.
Concrete finally curing in five hundred.
Years of overwhelming time
Shall pass away
Down rivers to the sea.
-- John Solter
The Inundation of
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.
A glacial mile down,
Life exists.
The
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.