Jaspreet Singh is a Montreal Chemical engineer, writer, poet, performer and teacher.

Coral

All that morning I wrote the Handbook of Fluid Mechanics

I began with water

because it has no memory

Unlike the molecules of oil and honey or even menses,

which remember both grief and reason

and flow without forgetting

Time does not break their equations of motion

By late afternoon

my mind was back to the shores of Kish ¾

that small, unfenced town in Iran

I flew to attend a conference once

and was exposed to a slender, bare-faced person

fern-like Marjan.

I was not allowed to speak to her

But the men explained in zaban-i farsi

the meaning of her name

was the farthest from the logic

of our conference

Solid, still, silent work of centuries

Dead flower of limestone. Living

jewel of the sea.

Coral.

Its external skeleton

so cusped, somewhat brittle

During the day the polyp curled up

by and by inside

a sepulchral shelter

By night

it absorbed zoo-plankton, or the arms

of a fabled starfish

For corals to face light was suffering

Yet (I noticed) the Sun oversaw their slow tasks

Sixty or seventy thousand of reverent algae

clung to the corallite

like Scheherzade clinging to a story

calming the sea with music, rock music

thrushing symmetry upon symmetry

threading the pages into a book:

the oral book of gardens, patented

beneath the shadow

of a passing bird ¾

Lightly I drifted

back to my Handbook of Fluid Mechanics

And as I inscribed the properties

of benzene, toluene, molten plastic

dusk descended.

Under the halogen lamp I kept writing

Entranced and comforted by that still growing reef in Iran

Marjan.