I recently flew across the country to see my parents in California, where I grew up. A favorite spot of mine since childhood has been the Monterey Bay Aquarium. I never miss a chance to visit when I return home. I have always been fascinated by the strange and beautiful world of aquatic life. As a child, I’d draw picture after picture of squiggly anemones, rudimentary tropical fish, crudely finned sharks, blobby otters, starfish and urchins to inhabit my crayon seascapes.
I feel most comfortable mostly submerged in water. My quality reading time and a good deal of writing seem only able to float to the surface after marinating in a bathtub for a spell. I’ve spoken to other poets and writers who share my affinity for submersion. I thought of this while wandering the aquarium tanks. I realized that, as a poet, I identified with many of the encased creatures I encountered; how both poets and aquatic life exist in a medium, whether liquid water or the flow of language; how, at times, we both seem separated from the world by a thin pane of glass and an unbreathable atmosphere.
With my face pressed close to the tank and eye-to-eye with an ogre-faced grouper nearly my size, I wondered: who watches who in this double spectacle? Perhaps a poem is not a thing published, but this performance of seeing each other and being-seen, even through, especially through, our differences. Different ways of breathing. Hands or fins to manipulate the world. The poem would then encompass the entire concept of aquarium, every staged site where the sea is dredged up and displayed on the land, where the darkness of the vast deep is exposed to our vision. When we look through these underwater windows, what might we learn about living and breathing together, we strange and colorful creatures?
Perhaps it is nothing less than how to live with each other; how to appreciate these weird ecologies we call home, how to love the unknown and unexpected. It reminds me of the fabulous poem “Bioluminescence” by Paul Tran featured in The New Yorker https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/06/28/bioluminescence and from the poet’s debut book All The Flowers Kneeling. I leave you to dive in and swim with the poem (and share it with kin and kith, if it so speaks to you). In it, the speaker of the poem recognizes similar identifications with the wild mysteries of the deep sea, writing “We were wild. Bewildered./Beautiful in our wilderness and/ wildness.” I invite you to imagine how it might feel to live with fins, to take in oxygen through your gills, to feel the beat of your eight-chambered heart, even how to glow on your own in the deepest darks. Take the dive—change your life.
