Word of the Day: benthos

benthos (n)

The biogeographic region that includes the bottom of an ocean, lake, or sea, and littoral and supralittoral shore zones.

"When the brief starred poems return to the volume, they are colored by this 'hydra' knowledge, and benthos becomes a model for art and for community, for existence as a kind of communal self submerged in the sea of experience: "Epipelagic movement enfolds/ one thousand giant clams/ thriving on the ocean floor./ 'the field.' its reciprocity."
--Philip Jenks, "My first painting will be 'The Accuser'"

(Benthos, by the way, is one of the words that the late David Foster Wallace circled in his dictionary.)

I cleaned the aquarium last weekend, as its benthos was getting a bit grubby. This brought on thoughts of the ocean and the beach and summer approaching...and an old poem I wrote:

Beach Day

It resembles a limeade spritz:
this crashing of the sea.

The rock pool pumps
like a heart.

Foam suggests
mounds of dirty meringue

or nothing in particular.
I've run out of metaphors.

Up on the highway,
a rumble machine

wavers in the heat and rolls
its belt of black tar.

Stones will be sand
one of these millennia.

I lie down, thinking of magma
spreading its ooze of fire,

and the whole day dissolves.
They will find me fossilized

like a Mesozoic fish
in a stone that falls out of a wall.