So lately there’s been some stories in the news about electric blue waves enchanting the surfers and beach bums of southern California. It seems the waters over yonder have reached conditions lately to produce bioluminescence. Some of the pictures showing this phenomenon are quite beautiful. It makes me jealous I don’t live closer to see it myself.
Once upon a time, though, I did get an up-close look at bioluminescence and even wrote a poem about it. Some time in 2015, I think, I visited Puerto Rico, where there are two or three “bioluminescent bays.” One or two of the bays allow tourists, though you have to luck into being there at the right time (weather permitting, no full moon, etc.) to visit them. I visited one where I had to catch a van on a 2-hour drive from San Juan to the coast and then kayak by night to the bay. Pretty special. Special enough to write a poem about it called…”Bioluminescent Bay.” (The level of creative titling is astonishing.)
I got the poem published with two others in a journal called The Writing Disorder. It was kind of a big deal for me to get 3 poems published somewhere, as I was still new to submitting and such. Back then, I was writing more poetry than fiction or essays for some reason. I say “for some reason” because it’s clear looking back how bad I was at it. Most of my poems weren’t very good. I wrote a rare semi-decent one like “Transference” but I don’t think “Bioluminescent Bay” was one of those rare ones. I had no idea what I was doing when it came to any of the kind of skill or ability necessary to write a decent poem, which I eventually realized, moving on to other forms of writing. Still, I thought I’d share the poem now, in honor of all the pretty neon blue imagery floating around the internet the past few days, thanks to those dinoflagellates floating around the coast of California.
Sadly, I have no pictures of my own to share. And that selfie triplicate of me at the top of The Writing Disorder page is from Bolivia, not Puerto Rico. Bit of a difference.
Bioluminescent Bay
I want this to be easy.
Like blink and we’re there easy
think and it’s done easy
wish and you’re here.
I don’t want the involvement of any effort on my part.
Don’t bring me to the luminescence
bring the luminescence to me.
None of this waiting for a new moon
banging around in the blackness with strangers
keeping kayaks in a line
swinging paddles through the Puerto Rican deep.
They tell us:
put your hands overboard
wiggle your fingers in the water
watch the little creatures crackle to light.
Little dinos, little flagellates.
I imagine a tiny long-tailed brontosaur,
a billion of ‘em, biting my rude huge hand
defanged piranha zygotes
lost in the Caribbean. It’s a long way
from the Amazon, a long way from the Mississippi
a long way from the Mesozoic.
I imagine a shiny long-tailed comet,
just one of ‘em, igniting my rude huge planet
smashing the dinos to bits
soldering speck-sized lights into their dino DNA.
The dinosaurs never died away.
They didn’t evolve into rhinos or birds.
They colonized the Caribbean
turned the Puerto Rican tides into a star show
you can swim in.
I want this to be easy so
I do what I’m told:
put my hand overboard
wiggle my fingers in the water
watch the little creatures
the little comet bedazzled buggers
crackle and roar to light.
I’ve come a long way from the Mississippi
for this.
René Ostberg 