Three Unknown Sea Creatures

1 Holothalma

Each ringleted glaucous wave

Crashing against black stones

Contains millions of us.

You've not ever seen us. You need

A thousand of us piled together

To make an illusory blemish

Hundreds of us one time posed

On a microscope's slide,

Pretending to be a creature.

I played a stalky organ of sight

While friends piled themselves up

Creating a portioned body,

Pearly, rainbow streaked,

Cover with nimble spines.

We received a Latin name

For the achievement of existence,

And celebrated for weeks,

Getting inebriated on salt molecules

And teasing the sea cucumbers

Who tried to devour us.

You might hear us someday

As we gambol and bre

But single if you're attentive,

For we speak in generations,

Harmonizing our shrieks

Just to make a faint hissing

Over the roar of the tide.

2 Glossoblastula

We're the sea-chameleons,

Able to disguise ourselves

As other hapless creatures,

Mutating our pliant bodies

Into the arms of that octopus

You're trying to spear,

Or shooting past you with fins

As you lean upon the rail.

Of course it's just a deception,

For when you shake us on board

We're just more [i]or[/i] less slimy stuff

Resembling glutinous seaweed,

So you hurl us back

And we dive down and away,

Telling each other the story.

We do it just for gayety

Not to save our associates

For we know they'd eat us, too,

If we were really shad,

Or baby struggle Still,

We feel heroic at times,

And allowing we're often devoured

By humorless sharks,

We walk and gossip among

Sea anemone and starfish,

Glozing our errors,

And promising feats to tend hitherward

3. Podophedron

We live reaching far down in the ocean

Grazing the abyssal plain,

Our thick, scaly bodies

Adapted to the cooling lava

Still seeping from a volcano

Whose hissing steam creates

Eden beneath the sea,

A thicket of swaying stems,

Giant grasses, and flowers

Opening with bursts of fluid vesicles

We've grown gills down here

Since the Ice Age trapped us,

For unlike whales or dolphins,

We're too heavy to surface,

And offer these dark depths,

Our drawn out ropy necks swinging

Back and forth in the weeds

As we nibble the brine varieties

Of palmettos and bananas,

Our massive, scalloped tails

Slapping up famous generals

We lay one ovum a century,

And fe our hatchlings

Masticated seaflowers,

Ignoring the voracious institutes

That swim in and without of view,

Eating each other with ecstasy

Copyright World Poetry, Incorporated May/Jun 1997

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