Narrow Bridge, Wide Sea
You are on the road again,
to where the bridge narrows.
But this time, you don’t think
you will fit.
It’s not a physical size issue,
looking in the mirror at your 63-inch frame,
fingers easily wrapping and meeting
around your wrist.
It’s these books you are reading,
the mind you are finding inside,
the self you are discovering because of it all.
It is the 365-million-year-old forest
tucked away in fossils on 62 acres in China,
hollow-rooted trees whose tops looked something
like a lop-eared rabbit, standing up to 25 feet tall,
spreading their snowman-shaped megaspores
to reproduce, whose closest relations living today
are mere mosses and quillworts, tiny beings
you have to crouch to see.
Your brain cells suck the juices out of
an essay about salps, gelatinous ocean creatures
who are more closely related to you than the jellyfish
they resemble, their juvenile forms having
what equates to a temporary backbone
that disappears when they become adults,
these clear tubular barrels that chain together
and pump water to lap up algae and phytoplankton,
creatures that contain a brain, a heart, and intestines,
and offer the earth a natural carbon sink
to our overheating world.
They swim in your imagination with the cuttlefish,
cousins to the octopus; their shell has been internalized
as a gas-filled bone used for buoyancy, and they flit
in and out of vision using camouflage with their
color-changing polarized skin cells that can transform
texture like that of a hardening nipple. At times, cuttlefish
seem to imitate clouds or zebras, the most flamboyant
the better suitor for mating. You think of your sepia-toned
quill ink, knowing now that rich brown pigment once
originated solely from the ink sac of your new tentacled friend.
Lying in wait beneath the sand of your cells
is the memory of the sand striker, an eyeless worm
that can reach almost 10 feet long with 5 striped
antennae who is best known as an ambush predator
of coral reefs, rarely seen except when snatching
a snack with tough retractable mandibles.
You, too, at times, would have liked the ability
to reproduce asexually by merely splitting your
self apart, then regenerating body parts only
as needed. The adaptation, the evident need to
be able to do this, as a natural introvert and
a fellow misfit, you understand.
Closing your eyes and shaking your skull,
you pause a moment…
…to realize that narrow two-way bridge was
never your natural habitat, not a journey
for your queer and mis-wired, jubilantly variant
soul. You’ve longed too long for the
multi-dimensional spectrum of the wide-open sea,
the water free of fences,
the roads dissolved and disappearing,
all colors flashing, light bending,
and you float and expand, drink in the words,
the love, the wonder that captures us free, after all.
Tansy Julie the Soaring Eagle Paschold
sources: National Geographic (May 2022); How Far the Light Reaches by Sabrina Imbler
