Her roar cut first, between our voices.
Glass broke.
The ocean was bringing demands.
We did not feel ourselves ready to hear these,
but they were not going to wait.
Party Crasher
When now comes unannounced.
Tag: ocean
The Long Return
Reading bones.
The bone-readers tell a story: how the ancestor of all four-limbed creatures took its first steps on dry land. Here’s another: one day, one of the descendants of those long dwelling on land decided it was time to return. What followed were those familiar-looking progeny: whales, dolphins, porpoises, who seem to hold a certain invitation in their gaze, their play near boats and shores, and we can’t help our awe when we see them, calling Look!
Looking long, some of the bone readers speculate that the swelling in our chests, our voices, our eyes at these encounters is perhaps the product of one part primal memory and another of a longing to believe––that it is possible for someone long adapted to those acres beyond the spectral surfaces that once meant certain death, who has somehow adjusted the senses to account for the cacophony of what batted and chirped, rustled and warbled; rattled in the grasses and the winds––to still hear the call of a migrating pod thousands of miles away and think: home.
***
Inspired by the opening passage in Amber Dance’s article “The Evolution of Whales from Land to Sea.” The italicized phrase above is from this passage.
Descent
Into the ocean world.
Mondays tend to offer numerous reminders of the need for an underwater excursion. With this in mind, today’s found poem is an assembly of phrases found in Jacques Cousteau’s introduction to The Ocean World, a stunning volume that featured prominently in my childhood imagination.
The act of life,
an eye permanently open––
immense, teeming; plankton like haze,
barely visible, monotonous. Now what?
The diving years reveal a thin layer
of sea, fragile––at our mercy, somehow,
this organized crystal of three-dimensional
nothingness: ocean intelligence buried
under waste. Consider the precariousness
of this third infinity, in the grabbing hands
of someone unable to think beyond what he
might take: salvation, discovery, the next ride.
Even the next image, and yet, listen at
the edges: what third infinity continues
in constant chorus, inaudible to those
above, still held by laws of degradation
before the threshold of this ancient beyond?