Intertidal
March 22 2016


Water creatures
stranded in the tidal flats.

Baby squid
scurrying crabs.

Slow swimmers, and bottom feeders
unprepared for land.

The shrivelled tendrils of jellyfish
that may still sting.

As the ocean abruptly recedes,
and the entire known world
pulls-out from under.

The irresistible tug
of invisible force

distant mass.
An accident of gravity
the luck of time and place.

The bizarre sensation of weight.
The rasp
of mud, sand, grit,
basking sun's
thirstiness.

As a whale gasps for breath.
Its giant eye
staring straight into mine
cannot comprehend.

Because the tide
catches randomly,
there is no planning death.

Although the poem seems very concrete in its intention -- factual(ish!), descriptive, and roughly narrative -- it's really about contingency; a theme to which I've often returned: intersections of time and place ...dumb luck ...a random universe.

I try hard not to write poems about death. But the image of the beached whale conspired with the natural rhyme to make that the final word. Sometimes, a poem insists on its own direction.

The penultimate stanza drops me into the picture: also stranded on the tidal flat. If the poem has any emotional power, that may be where it lies.

I shamelessly plagiarized my own recent work. In Fish Out of Water, I also toyed with this idea of weight as something utterly novel: incomprehensible to a suddenly grounded fish, feeling it for the first time. There, I used a phrase along the lines of ...never felt/ in a thousand generations of instinct. I think a twist like this is what poetry is all about: observing closely; seeing the world with fresh eyes; the mild jolt of turning the familiar through slightly different angles of light.

The poem came to me from a quick-cut image in a recent film I saw (was it Birdman??!) At this point, the context and intent escape me. But I'm left with this picture of a flotilla of jellyfish desiccating in inter-tidal mud. They are immobilized, shrivelling into the contours of the land, their domes dull and flat, and you can just imagine their insubstantial mass quickly vanishing. My immediate thought was "if you walked barefoot over these inanimate forms, would they still sting?" Since I always lament my inability to distil -- that I use too many words, that I don't trust the reader enough -- I have to say I'm rather proud I had the self-discipline to get all that down to shrivelled tendrils of jellyfish/ that may still sting.

Anyway, I like the idea of the intertidal: of this intermediate place, not quite sea and not quite land; of transience and surprise and unmasking; of contingency and suddenness. I say "suddenness" because, as someone who lives in the middle of the continent and only on fresh water lakes (even one as daunting as Superior), the idea that a person could be caught by the tide -- unable to outrun it -- hardly seems right. But I understand this may be so.