Sea Mother of Ocean Park

See mother? She drifts as pearly filaments trail.

The mirrored maze multiplies

this phantom thief.

A ghost trapped in Ocean Park,

a sea hammered into a concrete mountain.

A beauty cloistered in dark quarters.

Purdah. Confinement. A guarded treasure,

her flowered self, her own undoing.

A trophy of industry, she lives under disco lights

of tawdry blues and strip club reds

imprisoned in glass tanks and steel poles.

A jelly woman with no privacy for her toilette.

Visitors lewdly smash their eyeballs against glass,

gawk and tap fingertips as she flits and moves.

Planck proved this truth: Observation changes the water mother.

Her beauty—survival. She hides nothing, titillates

with roundness, a palm-sized puff, ideal to cup

and implant, yet she refuses harvest.

Shamrocks, ruffles, lines, patterns, hair nettle ornaments,

tubes and feathers, her accessories

sprout like splendid mushrooms.

A prickle of perfection, a shush of moon.

A Victorian beauty, all laudanum and grace.

Crowds admire her ronde de jambes.

Ah, the murmur she creates in men’s hearts.

Her poise reveals our water return.

Darwin led the plan

to catalog and harvest

the beautiful and unknowing.

In the end: Magnificent waters shrunk to large tanks.

A glass prison.

Watch.

See mother drift,

bounce against the roof,

roped by an electric current,

an ocean nebulae

ascending in colored lights

no escape from a shopping mall display

imprisoned and bound

to these painted walls

weeping the truth

of constellation stars