Out walking at lunch I came upon a garbage patch in the Fort Point Channel near Gillette Headquarters. I thought: here’s the Great Pacific Garbage Patch in miniature, but no less terrible.
One of my coworkers commented on the incongruous beauty in the photograph I took: a well-composed conglomerate of shapes, colors and textures — a trashy abstract expressionism.
For me, the sight brought to mind a beach I visited a couple of years ago in Cabuya, Costa Rica at the tip of the Nicoya Peninsula. There, the sea had artfully deposited plastic scraps and plastic bottles at the high tide mark,
and smooth warm beach rocks crammed the shelves of a refrigerator door.
Always one to state the obvious, the obvious dawns on me: we are living and dying by the ubiquitous cap and applicator and storage bin. But we can change, must change.
Further Reading on Plastic Pollution and Breaking the Plastic Addiction:
My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips’ red;
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.
I have seen roses damask’d, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks;
And in some perfumes is there more delight
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.
I love to hear her speak, yet well I know
That music hath a far more pleasing sound;
I grant I never saw a goddess go;
My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground:
And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare
As any she belied with false compare.
not in the clear stream,
I went fishing in the desert sky.
With rain-hooks at the sun’s end,
I caught a rainbow, its colors
slippery in my hands.
I gently separated,
like the bones of a trout,
the blue from the red,
the green from the yellow,
my knife sharp, silver-exact,
each color lean,
impeccably carved.
But the rainbow’s end,
though I cleaned and washed
the earth from it,
tasted bitter,
like gold.
From the book A Nostalgist’s Map of America (Norton: 1991, out of print). About Agha Shadid Ali.
