Poems by Janferie Stone

Ocean Gyres Turn

by Janferie Stone

From Canary Fall 2019

Janferie has lived on the Pacific Coast since she was 18. At present she lives on the slope of the Navarro Ridge between Salmon Creek to the north and the Navarro River to the south.

Algae bloomed seven years ago
birthing sea-star-wasting syndrome,
killing most of nineteen species:
the six-armed reds, five-armed ochre’s,
the giant sunflower stars,
sometimes twenty-six arms.
their bodies fourteen inches across.

Voracious those predators but now gone. Shells
empty, dissolving, returning to the original slime
of existence, goo seeping to the sea floor
where, in the rocky substrate,
purple urchins rose, unchecked,
exponentially growing from ten to a thousand
eating first at the feet of bull kelp forests,
their holdfasts, then the haptera branches
and then up their trunks, stipes rising
sixty feet in the tumble of waves
in the warm water of the reversed ocean gyre
the surface waters sluggish, stagnant ponds, heated,
and below no cold upwelling of food bearing water,
no bloom of krill.

The bull kelp wilted and
let go with their loosened toes,
the canopies of the vast forests drifting,
torn from their holds when
the drought ended and massive winter storms
threshed and heaved the float bladders to the shore.
Kelp grows from spores each year,
but could not bloom in the urchin desert,
in the dust bowl beneath the waves.
Ascending the water column, starvation and death.

Red urchins, uni, their sex organs shrunken,
non-reproductive, can no longer be sold
for Japanese manhood rites.
Abalones wither in their opalescence.
Thousands of tiny shells litter beaches,
gathered into nests of broken promises.

South in Monterey and north to Alaska
sea otters edge closer to the zero precipice,
for the keepers of the kelp world have no more to keep.

And orca packs hunt otters, harbor-seals, sea-lions,
while their prey and kin, the humpbacks,
the migrating grays and their calves
seek the echoes of a forest refuge
the manna of existence
in the barrens of our spiraling time.