Before the great death came, before the fire
And poison of the age's ending wept
Its curtain down, the sea retained its choir
Of all the beauty that the oceans kept
Through every age of life—the Permian sea
Was rich beyond what any age before
Had managed: every reef ecology
Alive with color, every ocean floor
Abundant—let us pause here at the water's
Edge before the dying, let us see
What the Paleozoic sea still offers
In its last fullness, let us be
The witnesses of what will not survive:
The coral gardens first—the rugose coral,
Coleios' neighbors, keeping alive
The reef's foundations in their oral
Architecture, building stone from sea—
Four-fold symmetry of polyp flesh
On limestone foundations, the decree
Of the ancient Paleozoic's fresh
And living architecture—this would go.
The rugose coral would not cross the line
Of extinction, would not see tomorrow's show
Of Triassic sea—their four-fold sign
Would vanish from the reef, replaced in time
By the six-fold scleractinian form—
But for now they rose in every sublime
Arrangement on the reef, the warm
And shallow sea above them lit with green
And blue and orange in the filtered light.
And there was Coleios in the scene—
The inked ones, masters of the night
And day of open water—Teuthis
Pulsed through columns of the sea
And Octopos walked among the lithic
Gardens of the reef with three
Times three of minds to read the world—
And in the open water, Belemno
The belemnite swam with his cylindrical curled
And solid body, sleek, torpedo
Of the Permian ocean, hunting small
And smaller prey through acres of the sea—
His hard internal rod the only wall
Between his soft flesh and the hungry
World outside—Sepos too, the cuttlebone
Bearer, who hovered in the mid-water
And changed his color like a living stone
Become a canvas, like a daughter
Of all color at once, a shifting flag
Of skin that could be anything the eye
Required—the color-changing brag
Of Coleios' house against the sky
Of ocean above.
And the ammonites—who had swum these waters
Since the Devonian, the coiled ones
Whose geometry produced the daughters
Of spiral perfection, the suns
Of mathematics in their shell's design—
Still coiling, still abundant, still the most
Common fossil of the Paleozoic's wine
Of time—they too would nearly be lost
At the great extinction, reduced to one
Or two survivors who would spread again
Through the Mesozoic like the sun
After the storm—but now they reigned
In numbers past all counting through the Permian
Sea, their shells the meter of the age.
And Malacos held the ocean floor's dominion—
Great Decapos in his heavy stage
Of armor crossed the bottom, claw raised high;
Euphausios filtered the cold waters wide
In clouds of millions, feeding every eye
That looked upon abundance—the inside
Of the ocean's engine, krill-built base
That fed the food web from the bottom up.
And Stomatos in his shallow place
Still struck his shrimp-fist punch, the cup
Of violence measured in the microsecond
Blur of club against the snail's hard shell—
This world was rich beyond all reckoned
Accounting—rich enough to fill
Each chapter of a thousand books and still
Leave volumes unwritten of the creatures
That the Permian sea kept—until
The fire came and changed all features
Of this world at once.
So let us pause.
Let us be grateful witnesses before
The curtain falls without applause,
Before the Paleozoic shore
Is poisoned—let us stand here in the light
That still pours clean and warm through water
Clear as any sky, and in the sight
Of reef and current, cuttlefish and otter-
Smooth belemnite, let us acknowledge what
The sea accomplished: three hundred million
Years of unbroken beauty, shut
At last but not diminished—still a billion
Lives complete within themselves before
The ending—the Paleozoic sea
Was not a failure for its close:
Each life lived fully is a victory.
Honor the last Paleozoic deep—
The reef that predates every reef we know,
The ocean that the Permian would keep
In trust for us to mourn and also know.