Sea Change by P.Q.R. Anderson
Dredged
to the accreted
gristle-rock,
resolving as sand
again in the gills
the sea is turbid silver,
attended by birds
of the by-catch, not
a net cast
to the other side,
but like the last
stone, overkill.
These chrome fish
brought to burn
their gills in air,
winched aboard,
become a tonnage
shrouded in rags,
glister-weed,
and to each its
parasitic worm
or hitch-snail.
In that bright
threshing
begin: cartilaginous
mouths mouthing
prayers of a people,
gills evolving
transit wings.
Who is it walks
on the shore
calling the shoals’
shadows as if
from the heights?
Why elect
these men,
these fish,
to multiply
the word at the fire
lit on the sand,
to feed the congregant
millennia?
Now the sturgeon
and cod are collapsed.
We begin
in this well-
oiled protein,
provender of
gully and trap,
the walled tides,
middens,
the fish otoliths
found inland
in compacts
of carbon and dung,
our caves,
and cast
our thought far
onto the shelves
where the great
birds blow
over the mown
quadrants,
to the flooded
caves we knew
how long ago
in the morning
Anthropocene.
Now reckoned
by plastic milled
to a yet
irreducible
dust of itself
or the ubiquity
of chicken bones,
we are our own
likely and sudden
expiration
who have netted
the currents
in that plastic
entanglement
and built a new shore
of flip-flop
and nylon and nothing
will get it out,
but still
rake the floor
of the krill-fecund
shelves
for the smaller
and smaller fry
while the by-catch
clusters
in winged clouds
out of Dante
over the dredge
of a more-or-less
anonymous
inhuman umami.
One day
we will construe
Cetacean
and be read
into the record
of the sea-change
as those
who browned the waters
and hauled
the drowned birds
aboard on our barbs,
if we survive.
Yet somehow we pray
the pods will outlast
as we settle
among our congener
chicken bones and plastic
hundreds-and-thousands,
knowing some deeper
deep, and singing
across miles of it
the elegies
asked of the ages
of the age
of our unmercy.
P.Q.R. Anderson has published three volumes, Litany Bird, Foundling’s Island, and a long poem In a Free State: A Music (“Destined to be a landmark in South African poetry” – J.M. Coetzee). He is the recipient of South Africa’s Thomas Pringle Prize for Poetry (2018) and the Sanlam Literary Award (2006), and was runner-up in the Vice-Chancellor’s International Poetry Prize of Canberra University in 2017, judged by Simon Armitage, and in The Rialto/RSPB “Nature and Place” competition in 2020. He teaches English at the University of Cape Town. His work has appeared in The London Magazine, Denver Quarterly, TEXT, The Rialto, New Contrast, New Coin, and other magazines.