So, sunflower sea stars are coming back.

For ten years they had a wasting disease,

got decimated hard.

Billions died but no one knew why.

Today, a tiny win

for the ocean, a ravaging paused.

Remember when I saw that one with 16 arms?

All sunset with purple edges?

Wrote a poem about it,

got a big back-of-thigh tattoo about it,

forgot about it. (You can’t see

the back of your own thigh most of the time.)

Time passes. A species can go extinct

and return all in the time

you’re working in an open plan office, lifting

3-pound weights, making red sauce pastas,

rotting. 2013, incomprehensible.

That’s when it started, the annihilation.

Turns out it was a bacteria

vibrio pectenicida

that melted their spiny bodies

twisted their meaty arms (up to 24, 24!)

until they fell off.

Disintegrated their tissues,

disappeared them.

Vibrio pectenicida

is related to cholera, vibrio cholerae.

Remember the page in my

illustrated Secret Garden?

Where the white tableclothed party is

silent except for a single snake slithering?

‘Cause all the guests died of a wasting disease,

except Mary Lennox, of course.

Mary had a bad attitude, got fixed

by nature. When I was little, I thought

the garden was really magic.

I didn’t understand the metaphor. But I do now.

I’m my own Dickon, loving lowly,

standing in the teeming deep

with a soft sludge at my feet, daring self

to sink down into the living mud.

My fuzzy blonde head a sunflower’s bloom.