Enigmas

Enigmas

A lobster weaves gold with its feet?

The ocean harbors answers, not I.

You ponder the ascidia in its glassy dome,

Awaiting—what? It waits for time,

As do we all.

What embraces does the Macrocystis alga seek?

There’s a sea, a time to learn its secrets.

You probe about the narwhal's spiral horn;

I narrate its demise, pierced and done.

Kingfisher feathers dancing in southern freshets—

Curious? Yes, so are many.

The sea anemone’s crystalline form perplexes you,

A riddle dealt from your deck of wonders.

You’re transfixed by the spines, electrical and fierce,

The moving stalactite encased in armor,

The fisherman’s lure in the abyss—

A melody, a thread through water.

Know this: the ocean is privy to the secrets,

Jewel boxes brimming with life,

Countless as grains of sand, immaculate.

In wine-dark depths, time crafts

Petals of steel, jellyfish luminous and untangled,

Their threads released from a cornucopia

Of endless nacre.

I am but a net, empty and cast forth,

Beyond the reach of human gaze, dead in the gloom,

Hands accustomed to framing the world, slicing

Latitude and longitude on a hesitant orange globe.

I wandered as you do, probing

The unfathomable cosmos.

In my net, under the cloak of night, I woke bare—

Nothing ensnared but a fish gasping in the wind.