The water museum opened yesterday.
All those crystalline forays from here to there.
There was a stopwatch with Argentinean sun-glint from the time of
Magellan.
There was a compass from a Japanese schooner that refused to point
north.
A Chinese junk kept lugging Bangkok girls into white slavery.
Penguin skins beached on Java as if even primordial love wasn’t enough.
Conquistadors camped by the fountain of Peruvian blood-baths.
Dip your finger here and cross yourself three times to ward off the teeth
of a moray eel.
Do you want to learn a prayer?
Try absorbing the banana splash of waves in Fiji refusing the
Constabulary and their men.
The water museum closed today, as if Antony had never wed Cleopatra,
had never drunk horse urine along the Nile to demonstrate his
strength.
Blackened, disparate, hopeless, nautical lines of bacteria invaded the Cape
of Good Hope, dispersed as black water fever, elephantiasis, a
malarial shivering for more.
Look, there are the throat gullies of the trumpet swan.
And there, the parasites without which the swan would die.
