Jellyfish, and: Teleology of Islands, and: Savants

Jellyfish

What cleanly drawn, transparent beings,lit, encased for education's sakein fluid neither flown nor flowing:

your umbilically corded brain'sa ring, your world's the same

on every side. Handless, eyeless,what have you to say to those of us with faces,who have faced and turned, and turned,

and piled our ghostly fingerson your glass?

Nothing at all—a lung,a flutter, not a thing—the thindifference betweenpushing away and letting in.

Teleology of Islands

What is there to say, night swimmer,lodged in the kindled mechanism of the stars,black water pooling around your feet.

The curved arms of the white plastic chairyou dragged from someone's summer housedraw the colder pieces of light.

Breath wells up, overflowing the ribs,as blood brings heat to every restless cell,where your lonely genes are coiling

and uncoiling in the dark, as the sea droplets dryto crystal on your skin, as your body goes onexpressing what it can. As the beacon

sweeps around again, catching the cedarsand madrones across the bay, throwingprehistoric shadows on the wild, unfinished coast.

Savants

The same-faced houses are waiting for the sea.Their ledges keep binoculars, their wallshang maps of depths. In bedrooms madeto harbor light, the children wake.

Fathers slouch in patio chairs, glancingfrom their sun hats toward contingent things— a sail snapped full, a gull hanging on air,answering each wrinkle in the wind.

The children have absorbedmore knowledge than you'd guess: the logicof the lens, the evolution of the wing. They've seenin time-lapse video, the blind, dynamic earth . . .

Tonight, before sleeping, they'll conjure the tripover contour lines to the blistering deep,the sonar's ping, the reckoning place,where the seafloor departs from the map.