In the deep sea, it takes thousands of years
to complete one circulation of surface and bottom water.
Here in Connecticut, the sunlight is hitting the waves
where the underside of the Long Island Sound is
surfacing to swallow the pollutants we put in the air.
Two cormorants, black as ink, sway up and down like buoys.
One dives down before the other follows and
for a moment their absence is an image of death,
of something there and then just as suddenly gone.
Now up they come, one by one, each
somewhere different than where they were before.
This scene might be observed by anyone
living after the construction of the Millstone Nuclear Power plant
that is visible on the far shore, by
a woman in nineteen eighty-four, or
a man thirty-five years from now
when the seas will have risen imperceptibly higher.
Then as now, the water will curve around the far shore
in the haze of the late afternoon sun.
Maybe the cormorants will still be here diving athletically into the depths
careless of the eye of all passerby.