A Bone of Nickel Coin Unwhole in Troubled Times

Only stone whales breathe by the sun.
To the anglers along the column air so dense it's bathypelagic,
the clouds pare off the heads of the stone whales which breach the ocean.
 
Snapping air-popped marigolds from a paper bag,
oranging red through the fist of a hand.
The suns don't rise any lower
than the seed heads convecting the flaring tails in a radial indefinitely—
overflown of feathers to the periphery.
 
Height of station.
The atmosphere lays its knee to your neck.
The concrete density curls the will.
Many are found burst gutless with their bootstraps intact.
Clouds do drop to the earth,  
pour from the vents.
The headless whales wade further up at the mid-drift as if the sky to them became shallower.
The reefs retreat to private and take this—
up to the second lowest mollusk.
Quartered off by diffuse flows, might it be thought in this instance that they're dead because the faces are gone missing?
 
I snap marigold.
The sun looks bright,
fiercely wound to an axis.
 
The bathypelagic columns proliferate,
but the vents don't channel to upper sea.
The stone whales and sometimes the first mollusks of the reefs,
if they breathe on another bulb
and are not dead,
we're puzzled  
because they haven't returned to intervene.
 
The marigolds are beautiful
from this bag.
Antithetical essence at times,
existence is immutable.