Algae in the Loch

 

By the loch side, still pleasant, DON’T JUMP!

The algae killed a man last night:

lungs eaten and aching and bruised. 

This circular campus like a panopticon for the great monster:

head like that of a small snake bird looking for prey of lesserness–

looking for the warmth in the water, for the life in the deadly algae.

I come here to see how the deer curl up like cats in the field, 

the one the football players don’t know about, before

the pub crawls of the evening settle into the liver, 

listen to the way the cicadas sound like the ones from home–

over the larger loch of the Atlantic, frantic Baptists are fleeing

to the chapels, passing by old fashioned farms and horse and 

buggies pittling along the roadside. This fleeting feeling once

a home for the right-minded me. 

By the loch side, I write letters home to mother, who might have

been swallowed by algae herself, lost somewhere in heaps of 

international stamps and envelopes large as my head, don’t 

bend these love letters home to my mother. Fragile, fragile things. 

I challenge because I am petty, where the plank to walk is, 

where the edge of the loch meets the skin of the foot, 

where the domain of the stickier soles meets a fated

moldy stomach. Water in the lungs is made up of the 

same water found on Mercury. 

This is the first rule set by stomach acid. 

Declare! Declare! Death upon the flood of Mercury!

Foreign planets are no clearer than the highlands above me,

the ones that fondly once connected to the mountains I was

birthed from. I ran from home to hike in circles and

learn from funny accented professors. The doctors, the doctors,

just as plain. 

I’m so hungry, for I cannot eat the skeletons of decayed

crawdads here. Along the shores, you will find the lily pads,

the small frogs, the cat deer, the tall braided grass I trampled 

over the night before, drunken walks under moonlight.

Officer, officer, I heard the splashes in the water!

What does the witness make of fantastical beasts,

swallowed whole old men, fleeting animals from the water,

crumbling castles on hills behind the navy blue sky, or the

croak of the Scottish frog as it reaches to my toes, it presses

a piece of the loch into me. 

Home, home, I wonder if I am dying too!

I write this to my mother, whose voice I only

recognize when I hear it in mine. When I shout:

Hear me! The man is suffocating on Mercury!

Spiteful thing it is, this concept of wondering. 

I don’t know how to return home with these watered

down lungs. I don’t know how to eulogize

my decaying feet.