Too brief again, this August light
For Austen Clyde Prescott, June 20, 2005-August 3, 2023
But the uncommon heat will not break.
Rain sizzles the roof tiles as if the heavens
make breakfast for gods who are
the furthest thing from benevolent,
belching discontent. The sky a cafecito.
And no redolence rises from the kitchens
of households blessed enough to breach
each morning’s surface in concert. In chamber,
cups grow concrete. The dogs bury
themselves under the sturdiest of sofas.
All summer, we have been learning
about loss: Sensation. Movement.
How an eye can refuse to close. A smile
freezes; halves. Bit by bit, the inability
to swallow, the gullet an open coffin.
That final week, off the coast of Key Largo
where it’s so womb-warm that the coral
bleaches into skeletal fingers, only 60 miles
from where Lolita is also dying in her saline
container, a group of five killer whales ruptures
the skin of the ocean, alerting the nearby
fishermen who don snorkel gear and jump in
to receive them as they swim toward the vessel,
back, forward and back, those muscular, inquisitive
bodies that hurl themselves with such joy
fifteen feet into the air. In the wild, marine
biologists say, orcas are no danger to humans.
The academics of whales, they hunt in packs,
bear down on boats out of curiosity, slap seals
with their tails like soccer balls, by cruel accident
in play slay porpoises they encircle.
But they, too, own the language of fear
and grief and memory. Born to singular paths,
each pod gulps only the fish their forebears
ingested, travels their ancestors’ routes,
like this family whose sojourn in this foreign
habitat, a fleeting distraction for those who keep
vigil, is sent by a message coded into their brains,
who must wait for the rest of it to be actuated
before they can make the essential turn for recall.
