My Chemistry

I used to follow parcels of water
around the ocean
a student called them parasols
which makes perhaps
as much sense as a box of brine
someone like Santa
or the UPS man might deliver from North
Atlantic into depths
to flow southward toward a fate
in calm Indian
or eggbeater swirl of Southern
Ocean around Antarctica

I lifted molar fingerprints
to trail parcels
suffused with their last gulp of surface—
CFCs marking time
with their singular blend in the
atmosphere each year:
here’s a fine ’77, bottled off Greenland,
now worming through
Titanic (these compounds hermetic,
their signatures blurred
only when a container of fridges is made to
walk the plank),

or carbon-14, which keeps a
memory of bomb
for any parcel surfacing since 1950
revealing how much
has been swallowed and sunk by
its own cold
saltiness, how long it takes
to crawl through
four oceans and float back up—1,000
years, and what
will it wake to, a hothouse or snowball,
how far will

we have gone or be gone by then,
and what’ll you
do without us, we wonder like a capsized
lover, the way
I heard the whales in the Bay of Fundy
had stress hormones
lower than scientists ever measured before
in late September
2001, quiet among millions of invisible floaters
carried by currents
and giant fecal pellets that must frighten them and the sea
snot or mucilage

plankton might exude in heat although
there are not
many experiments you can do down there,
better to be
an observationalist—detecting what is or trying to
write it down
and not get too seasick along the way: I once
played badminton on
a container ship’s deck with the captain and kept
hitting the birdie
on top of the containers he would smile and say
it’s okay I

have another one until finally after I had done it
again and again
he said I think it is best if we stop playing now
that is how
science feels most of the time that is my
chemistry: a parcel,
something to hold in your hands,
bang skull against,
tearing and unfurling its carapace, each
cubic-metric Davy
Jones’ Locker full of swarms of molecules and ions
flowing in and

out of all six sides along the gradients of salt oxygen
carbon dioxide silica
from which diatoms make their
slim glass parasols
to enchant the microscope slide,
one box after
another, piled high and wide, an ocean
of these boxes
like the screen full of small ones
full of numbers
I gathered while at sea and took back
to my room

to turn into wild
pictures of deep
feeling (for a time)
that they were mine