Oil Spill

The ocean is leather in slow motion.
Waves don’t break, they squat and slide.
Stick a finger in—thick as fudge
up and down the beach;

and the fixed, brown bubbles
mean death by suffocation.
May the men who did this
boil and roll in a sea coat of oil;

and may their superiors
join us and our neighbors
on our knees
to scrub this beach to the bone.

If they are unwilling,
may they stand naked facing a mirror
and hear behind them, forever,
the fawning and sniveling of underlings.