Chelonia mydas (Green sea turtle)

Weather is not climate: a cold wintermeans nothing to rising waters sinking beach

to cold-blooded sapling beings, blood warmingwith the oceans by degrees. In the Book of Ceremonies

the dragon, single-horned rhino, phoenix,and turtle are the four entities that possess spirit—

their shells were used for divinationand some believe Chinese script was taken

from the markings on their backs.Neither fish nor fowl, they chew grass

like a cow, swim like a seal, and breathewith lungs, not gills, and through their skins,

absorbing everything. They rememberthe dinosaurs: the searing vapor cloud

and wonderfully sudden disappearanceof the ammonites when the weather rained

hot dust and with the lizards and the angiospermsthey sailed across the k-t boundary

through millions of centuries to us.

Now all along the underwater soundinglines they fly at speed: their shoulders

a rounded prow, their flippers, wingsthat convey them from the Galapagos

to Malaysia, from Ascension Island to Brazil—for every turtle can navigate by the earth's

magnetic field. They float and dive, riseand sink through all the precincts and phrases

of nautical life, from sandy beach to islandsof Sargassum where hatchlings feed

and breathe, endangered in the danger zone.

From science we learn of the egg tooththat vanishes, the three-chambered ventricle,

the boney carapace and softer plastron,the delicate calipash and calipee tasting of empire

and victory overseas. The flexible scutesthat pattern their backs shatter only

when the angel shark's teeth meet their markor when dropped from the winch onto the purple

riprap of the breakwater. Columbus and his crewsaw tortoises of a vast bigness and in such numbers

they covered the sea, closing the gapbetween ship and sand, as though you could stroll

across their shells to land and conquest.

Greenback, soup turtle, tortuga blanca—once in the Caribbean, I too followed her

eager through hurricane-bleached reefsseeking eelgrass and algal bloom that turn

the fat beneath her carapace buttery green.Perhaps, like us, they suffer mainly from reminiscences,

heartsick for language of sea cucumberand pinkish elkhorn coral, for the unmistakable

natal sands of the beaches where we were born.It takes an hour to dig down and unload

the one hundred or more leathery eggsinto hourglass nests, then drag yourself

back to the comfortable sea. She is long gonewhen the shore turns gothic as Violet Venable

in Suddenly Last Summer, with its desperatemidnight pell-mell scramble and bird-dark sky,

all of us trapped by this devouring creation.

I think I learned from Lewis Carrollthat turtles weep, though not in agony

or grief. The sea turtle isn't sentimental.She carries four elephants and the globe

on her back and falters only amid fish trawlsand plastic shopping bags, the long line and boat strike.

Eighty million years ago she dreamed awayfrom freshwater to salt and has been crying

ever since. The turtle shells used to divinethe future during the Shang dynasty never foresaw

the black currency I must admit into this reveriefor when the turtle declines to sing,

and for the eighty-seven days the broken wellbillowed and gushed, and for the five years

that on a daily basis two hundred milesof coastal seashore were oiled with turtles

washing up from Port Arthur, Texas,to Apalachicola Bay—the longest unusual

mortality event recorded in the Northern Gulf.