Sea Star Wasting Syndrome

See the sea floor in Puget Sound littered with limbs    like the hacked up mash of a battlefieldleft by Roman legionaries. Pilings once rippling

    with lavender starfish, crimson, the gold of banked coalssplayed wide like hands, palm to rust, as though for a daredevil’s

    jackknife to dart between the fingers—now thinnedto a few crucified bodies, limp and twisted.    No one knows why—distant pathogens

hitched to the hulls of ships, a virus, rising    ocean acidity, particle debris

from Fukushima, but specimen by specimen,    species by species, the limbs contort (somesuffer lesions) then begin to walk

    in opposite directions and tearfrom the body. If you can’t live in the water

    you were born to, you can’tlive. If you can’t live in the air. I’ve seen beautiful people    rip themselves apart. I’ve seen the hand

wreak havoc the head couldn’t stop. Starfish have radial    symmetry, photoreceptors, sensitive spines.

Most can shuck an arm to escape a crab or gull    and grow it back. But thesespill their guts in the surf and rot. Imagine a terror

    so great the limbs drag themselves freefrom the body. Imagine such terror of the body

    itself. Once a jewel wasp has stung a cockroach,the victim waits for its attacker to return,    preening as if to make an impression,

then ambles placidly to the wasp’s lair to be colonized    and devoured from inside

by a solitary egg. When a spore of the fungus    Ophiocordyceps unilateralis infects the brainof a carpenter ant, the ant lives

    through a series of convulsions until it dropsto the ground then climbs, steadily now, up a stem

    and clamps its mandibles beneath a high leaf,so that once the fungus shoots a stalk    from the ant’s head and ruptures, the cloud of spores

has maximum spread. No one knows what drives a sea star    mad. In zombie stories, we identify

with the survivors. I’ve seen people    who couldn’t abandon their bodiesfast enough. The tide we writhed in after was not made

    of the same sadness that ate themfrom inside. When a healthy sea star is placed in a tank

    with an infected specimen, it doesn’t appearto die any faster. If communities    of self-slaughter litter the Pacific

with skittering limbs of fuchsia, orchid, hammered gold,    there may be nothing we can do but watch.