In the Muck or the Order

Lyrics

A glass jar on the slope of Lōʻihi.
Polymetallic nodules glinting in the ROV light.
A collection of small, perfect worlds.
Your worlds, Clara.

They called you Clean Freak Clara.
I read it in Mayhew's book, the one from 1851.
A joke on the Thames foreshore, four-thirty in the morning.
Your hands, raw in the winter water, sifting the black mud.
The smell of coal tar and everything London threw away.
You, searching for copper nails, for scraps of bone.
For anything the river gave up.
A life spent in the city's filth.

And in this jar, a perfect order.
Every sphere of glass, clean and contained.
A memory polished, a moment held still.
Clara, tell me.
Do we find ourselves in the muck?
Or in the order we make from it?

I can almost see you, wiping your hands on your apron.
Pulling a German alley marble from your pocket.
This one, for the silver shilling you found near the wharf.
This swirled blue one, for a kindness from a stranger.
This chipped red, for a word that cut you.
A secret ledger, a private museum.
Kept on a clean shelf in a room that smelled of soap,
while the river mud dried under your nails.

And in this jar, a perfect order.
Every sphere of glass, clean and contained.
A memory polished, a moment held still.
Clara, tell me.
Do we find ourselves in the muck?
Or in the order we make from it?

But this isn't the Thames. This is the Hawaiian-Emperor chain.
A world away. A hundred years deep.
Did you carry this jar to the edge of the world?
Did you need to place your small, perfect order
in the one place that was utterly, elementally clean?
A place of new earth, and pressure, and fire.
Or did you just have to let it all go?

The jar sits in the silt.
The memories are still inside.
Waiting in the dark.
In the muck.
Or the order.
Which is it?