Darwin: A Life in Poems
‘Plankton’
The deck is dazzle, fish-stink, gauze-covered buckets.
Gelatinous ingots, rainbows of wet flinching amethyst
and flubbed, iridescent cream. All this
means he’s better; and working on a haul of lumpen light:
polyps, plankton, jellyfish and sea butterflies, the pteropods.
“So low in the scale of nature, so exquisite in their forms!
You wonder at so much beauty — created,
apparently, for such little purpose!” They lower his creel
to blue pores of subtropical ocean. Wave-flicker, white
like a gun-flash over the blown heart of sapphire.
Peacock eyes, beaten and swollen,
tossing on lazuline steel.