NYT: Hurricane Filled New York Aquarium

Tanks in the Sea Cliff exhibit were open at the top

And vulnerable to the incursion of seawater with their clouds

Of salt-water minnows now cast on the deep pile of lobby carpets,
Among the grains of harbor magnetite scattered among invasions

Of the sunny tropics—Indonesian seahorses knowing nothing of clouds
Of Wiring and insulation, where the City’s gut itself has extensions into the arms,

Such is the tarnished inlay of light grids reflecting everything but the real invasion—
Faster than evacuated hearts, the counting houses and their outflows are abandoned

Their modes of thought and enjoyments, whose race is moving inward into the arms

Revealed to be those of the Lord. Floodwater occasioned its siphons through glass,
Entangled the sieves of whiplash tails and dorsal spines. A crown of thorns abandoned

From Indo-Pacific waters is blocked from menacing life abounding in tanks arranged side

By side like tiles. They come to wipe declining old contaminants besmearing the glass,

And although they have no head, no heart, the sluggish jellies note there is less being
Eaten, less diffused gas. Just as the keepers—whose impulses are normally aside

From people— struggle to pump the basement out. Activate the carbon filtering this world

Portrayed in miniature. The fish were happy to remain in their own half, there being
Less for those necessities, but three-inches of shower stall water; thankfully, not carpet,
Harboring an American eel rechristened Lazarus, who will be the celebrity of this world

From our museums of e-mails, life work of tenants carried away by pressures of life at the top.