full spectrum eye appeal, by Daphne Marlatt

lost in depths that absorb

sun’s red or orange wavelength

miniatures hunt

striped nudibranch’s toothy rasp

at luminous sea pen, painted

anemone’s tactile wave

stung crab to mouth

sea cuke’s moptop licking its

tentacle chops we forget

underwater gastronomy

its delicate clarity of interception, inter-

connection lost

to the dry suit beings we are

solo surfing the next new wave

through passages of print black

on white

while vermillion and purple stars

climb walls on slow tube feet

tanker traffic will rock

not to any lullaby, the super

duper poster image of

profits, the gracious do si do

we do in grocery aisles

our eyes on “oceanwise”

our still so surface eyes

Daphne Marlatt [photo credit: Jocelyn Mandryk] is a Vancouver poet whose titles includes Steveston, Touch to my Tongue, This Tremor Love Is and the novels Ana Historic and Taken. Her novelistic long poem The Given received the 2009 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Award. Also in 2009, Talonbooks released her international award-winning contemporary noh play, The Gull, with photographs from the 2006 Pangaea Arts production. In 2011, the chamber opera “Shadow Catch,” for which she wrote the libretto, was produced by Pro Musica at The Firehall Centre for the Arts in Vancouver. From 2010 to 2012 she served as the fiction Associate Director for the Banff Centre’s Writing Studio.  In 2012 she was awarded the George Woodcock Lifetime Achievement Award. Talonbooks will be releasing a double series of her poems about the city, Liquidities: Vancouver Poems Then and Now in 2013.  She lives in Vancouver’s East End with her partner Bridget MacKenzie and their dog and cat.