Perhaps we see you best with our ears,
your delicate arms marred by wave action
and chemical burns, your bald patches
large as provincial forests,
meaning we can’t see your wholeness at all
except from the silence of outer space,
your silence, more ancient than Palmyra,
your good body, long as a continent,
meaning we can’t grasp you
with our brain though it burns like yours
through the early years, then prunes
itself, removing whole neuronal groups
before weaving new dendrites
into competent nets.
I like my neural net.
It lets me feel your pulse in my wrist
when you cough young spurts from enormous cones
and creep imperceptibly south toward the coldest pole,
lets me love your name: Acropora cervicornis,
Staghorn Coral, though you are not my domain,
rather the you in You, as I am the I in Us,
lets me see and hear and feel your loss,
as it seems you have become
just one huge thing too many.