These cleared and stained specimens allow us to see things about the animals we could not otherwise observe.
Stain
To mark, to color, to dye.
Sully with infamy; corrupt.
Spot not easily removed.
Taint of guilt.
Here, in red—green—blue—
skull, spine, hyoid
offset from void
by nightclub neon.
A concept through a glass jar.
Fixed blotch of the fleeting.
Reduced to its distillate, this figure
an essence
for recognition,
for keeps,
not for love.
Skate Fishing
Their mouths moved me most,
flesh-lipped, white, gasping,
womanly lips, married to death.
They came up fast, like widgets
or shirts or yoghurt cups
on the conveyor belt of quality,
clubbed on the head, one after next
with the fisherman’s red rubber mallet.
Life, the design flaw of food—
not even a mushroom
nor grain of wheat free of it.
The motor chuckled and hissed
and churned its sea-colored secret
filamentous lattice of green.
Detangled of net,
flung on the deck,
subdued, still alive, they sucked air,
blinking eyes black-hollow as ghosts.
The deck hand stumbled on dozens
of skins slippery under his boots
to saw off their sides for market,
these salt-loving angels of water
who soar the great Atlantic
on wings now unable to lift them
or breaths to inflate them
with the stuff of heaven:
that intangible soul of being
for which we would sell anything.
Mole
Shovel claw. Deep digger. Diver of the dark.
Nose-for-eyes, cruising the soil’s truffly fragrance,
a scent like cold ale, trapped between grains.
Walnut and chocolate, biscuit, apples, wheat,
a malt of time, the color of tea.
Little earth chaser, blowing your bubbles
under weeds and gardens and fungus and roots,
my mother hates you, you kill her flowers,
swimming through dirt like an ocean of stars.
You hump up the mulch over tunnels and secrets.
You row your black boat of silken fur.
It’s you who stir at the core of the world,
burrowing your wormholes at the very toes
of the great God-tree.
Rabbit
El-ahrairah would be proud.
Ghost-rabbit, you have conquered
the underworld, linings of your ears
ashine, your eyes sockets,
paws still leaping, sure as a hunting-dog,
each rib straining. You are ready
to draw the chariot of the dead,
meek as the lamb, crafty as the lion,
nibbling the silences between twigs,
stalking the Reaper’s dark forest.
Thief of all that grows
you cheat consequence,
your scat nourishes seedlings,
you steal time, shepherd it under soil.
On All-Hallows the sod
remembers beings like you
who crept to trade their ears, their tail,
into the fearsome den of the god.
Over you death’s jurisdiction falters:
the fear with which you tremble
is a trick, your bound the truth.
When it calls for me I hope it looks
like you, glimmering as the dusk falls.
Red Dory Eyes
Cyttopsis rosea
The eyes are the window to the soul
but what soul is this,
emotionless, seeing
not us but prehistory’s
depths of sea
gazing across
unreachable past
a message
but veiled in glass
The eye sees a thing more clearly
in dreams than the imagination awake
muppet-bright,
playfully bobbling
on weirdly opposite
sides of flat skull
child’s play
in all its seriousness
My eyes are an ocean in which
my dreams are reflected
in color of coral,
garish,
rare,
scraping the bottom
to make clouds out of sand
The eye is the jewel of the body
a fish is the jewel of the sea
split, cooked, plated
straight from earth’s furnace
The eyes indicate the antiquity of the soul
and what more ancient
than a fish?
castle, sculpture, urn
poured from waves
that scoured time for ideas
cartilaginous lens
begun in the Cambrian
adapted to see
through obscurity
They seemed to be staring at the dark
but their eyes were watching God
a flower, a fruit,
blooming silver, pink, red,
plucked from dark gardens:
creation to consumption
even these waters
a hellfire or heaven
fueled by burning
until time and sight end
Italicized text from: anonymous proverb, Leonardo da Vinci, Anna M. Uhlich, Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Zora Neale Hurston.
Smooth Puffer
Instead of spines, you have stars.
I cannot stay away
from the cosmos, when I look at you.
Inflated, gravid,
your throat in death
pooches out, as though about to speak
or sing, a diaphragm
filled to tell the world who you are.
Do not eat me, you proclaim,
do not take me; I’ll be your death too.
Poison sparkles silk-smooth skin,
trickster fish, tempting the fisherman.
On Jersey shore
in 2016, you multiplied, blithe
from southern waters.
I threw it back, reported the angler.
Sometimes, rarely,
we learn what not to keep.
Fringe-toed sand lizard
Uma scoparia/notata/inornata
Taxonomy of death.
First, genus. Italicized, for emphasis.
Uma.
One, in Portuguese, single.
No, no. Wrong root.
In fact, for Yuma, Native tribe. Like their namesake, belonging to desert—
believing that all beings, lizards, rocks, mountains, sands,
birds, stunted trees, cactus, air, dry winds,
jack rabbits, burrowing owls, brittle bushes, ants, rain,
lifegiving Colorado River,
have souls, spirit, a point of view.
The species: scoparia.
Having twigs.
It runs on fringed back feet, skimming sand
like walking on water.
Or notata.
Marked. As in blotches—
as in fated, threatened, doomed. By off-road vehicles, left a smear on the sands.
Or again, inornata—unmarked—
as compared to marked, lives only in the Coachella Valley,
three quarters of its habitat erased.
Arizona, Nevada, California, the drylands,
Joshua trees, arms upraised to sky, tawny flats
stirred by many small feet.
Uma, the woman. In Sanskrit, tranquillity. Splendour. Fame.
in Hebrew,
nation.
Uma, dancing the desert, feet emitting fine spray,
Jesus-lizard of the southwest, miracle worker,
soul reflecting ours, arms out,
dying for our sins.
Garter Snake
Glyph, cipher, red-green scrawl.
I caught them as a little girl,
precise calculation, galaxy’s swirl.
Civilization fell to crumble
where the sidewalk ends.
Under an abandoned door
on a junk heap, in a field,
they were secrets to uncurl:
unkinking head, vertebrae, tail,
question mark, hurricane’s whirl,
first fistfuls of reliable order.
Italicized text from Shel Silverstein.
Seahorse
He is maternal, the little man,
standing erect among weeds
washed by waves.
In the thick pouch
of his protruding belly
the baby horses wait, each strange
and slow and sweet, like him.
An endless ocean waters
the sea of his hopes, a space
beyond imagining:
a sparkle in the inner distance
under sunlight, then a long shadow.
A world goes on beyond sight,
beyond the thread of reed
where he clings, a root in shifting sands.
Now this one, in an aquarium
harboring his young, where he nods and coils.
His triangular head
looks not into blackness
but human faces staring.
An ancient knowing lives in his eyes,
a sea that got in there somehow,
each joint of his tail a cartilage
of that relentless sequence
of purposeful change,
to clasp in one’s tail, one’s pouch
the whole ocean and its past,
the joints of geology,
of history.
All that creaks as he lets go
and takes hold again, as though it were still there.
Stephen Petegorsky is an artist and freelance photographer based in Florence, Massachusetts. Born in New York City, he graduated from Amherst College and later received his MFA in Photography from Rhode Island School of Design. He has taught at Amherst College, Smith College, Hampshire College, and the University of Connecticut. His work has been exhibited internationally, and is in collections throughout the United States and Europe.
Naila Moreira teaches at Smith College and has been writer in residence at the Shoals Marine Laboratory and Forbes Library. Her second chapbook, Water Street, won the New England Poetry Club Jean Pedrick Prize, and her middle grade novel The Monarchs of Winghaven will debut from Walker Books US in 2022. She’s also worked as a journalist, environmental consultant, and Seattle Aquarium docent.
Read “The Reaper of the Sea” by Naila Moreira also appearing in Terrain.org.
All photographs by Stephen Petegorsky. Photo of Naila Moreira by Jermane Stephinger.
