The Immortals
Bell-shaped and translucent, jellyfish begin their ascent from the ocean floor.
They’ve completed a novel process in the animal kingdom: transdifferentiation.
It’s a reversal of the biological cycle as we know it—undoing the narrative arc
tracing birth to adulthood before the inevitable decline and death. The jellyfish
upend everything we know about death in flora and fauna. At the cellular level,
they grow younger when the time comes to die. They transform backwards
into a nascent version of themselves before starting the process over.
It doesn’t mean they are incapable of dying—it’s simply not in their nature.
They rise through the midnight-dark waters and into bands of sunlight
the way thought forms in the subconscious before burning in waves
across the neocortex of the human brain. And as they rise,
fathom by fathom, they become lighter. As each incarnation
returns, history unfolds and the world is made new. They rise
into the Age of Agriculture with its domestication of wild grain,
with the comprehension of seed to stem to fruit. They witness
the emergence of cities. Wheels and alphabets and metallurgy.
Buddha and Confucius, Jesus and Mohammed. The Age of Flight
and the Age of Information. The jellyfish descend to regenerate
and then rise through it all, limpid and curious, as astronauts
step upon the lunar surface and as armies kill each other
without cease. Humans turn their thoughts toward Mars
and beyond, as the jellyfish sink down into the ancient shadow
where they have always gone, as if death were a form of sleep,
a dream from which they are revived, one lifetime to another,
cycling through the stages of life as the elastic architecture
of their bodies is made strange and new all at once. Blooming.
Starfields glimmer in the wavetops above. Sunlight scatters at dawn
and dusk. The ocean is a silver film of moonlight stilling itself.
And through it all, the jellyfish. The immortals. They have come
to watch galaxies loosen their spiraling stars as photons
shimmer on the interstellar breeze. They are steeped in time.
They have learned to reinvent themselves in defiance
of the body’s undoing. They rise from their own deaths.
They rise from the bottom of the sea. Soft bells,
diaphanous and fine, the universe offers them wonder
and they gather in their multitudes to take it all in.
The Gray Wolf, 21M
After his mate, 42F, was killed on the southern slopes of Specimen Ridge,
he made his way through the pines overlooking the Lamar Valley—a landscape
where they’d once reigned over 37 gray wolves, the largest pack ever recorded—
and he lingered there in the moonlight, reminiscing on days gone by, moments
they’d shared, all they’d seen and done.
There’s no way of knowing these things
for certain. What is in the heart of a wolf cannot be recorded by radio collar
or written in a report. I’ve heard them howling in Yellowstone, but I can only imagine
the expression of pain, or love, in a wolf’s body.
And so he followed the grassy drainage
of Opal Creek down toward the valley floor as the sky lightened at daybreak.
He raised his muzzle then—one last time—and howled.
When park rangers rode in
on horseback to identify his body, the air was still, the leaves unmoving, with shadows
slung between trees. They rode through a diminishment, a wordless thing they could only
share in silence, as if the sound of that wolf had drifted through the pine boughs
and on into the valley, something like an adagio coming to rest in the sagebrush
at a third below the melody of the strings, the wolf still howling from A to G to A,
a few notes up from middle C on the piano.
The horses dipped their heads.
The rangers leaned on their pommels to consider the end of an era.
The gray wolf of Yellowstone. 21M. Perhaps the most famous wolf
ever to live. A wolf who was inconsolable in his grief. Bereft.
Is it any wonder he simply curled up under a tree and died?
Cuvier’s Beaked Whales
They hunt the deep for glass squid and giant grenadier fish,
ray-finned smelts and lanternfish, plunging almost ten thousand feet,
their breath held for over two hours at a time. As they sink, they wave
their flukes good-bye, something like the way you and I used to drift
off to sleep each night, our mouths opening in the blue dark.
What these whales cannot comprehend, or comprehend all too well—
the acoustic blasts of active sonar; submarines probing from 1-10 kHz.
In the open ocean, it’s the sound of hunger. Cold. Metallic. Predatory.
Unlike humans, they listen through their throats, with soundwaves
traveling through channels of fatty tissue before entering their bony ears.
And when the Navy pulses its sonar, panic triggers within the whales,
a panic that drives them into the abyss or to the shore, the ascent
bringing on decompression—
the bends, gas bubbles of nitrogen
accumulating in their veins, internal vessels
hemorrhaging in bronchopulmonary shock,
their bodies disrupted at the cellular level,
the spinal cord crackling
with a searing, unrelenting pain
—and this is what spirits them to beach themselves on the shores
of an unlivable world, where they are bewildered, undone beyond
any reckoning, each animal suffocating as seagulls circle above,
the flukes and fins of these whales no longer of any use as the last
watery film evaporates from their highly-sensitive skin, each whale
changing hue as if turning to shadow, waves of sound muted
within them as this airy medium weighs them down,
their throats unable to amplify the strange figures
on approach, those with otherworldly voices
that register only at a faint decibel, with tones
so low and hushed and laden with dread
as they whisper and kneel before the whales,
touching each whale with such delicate palms,
with such tenderness, their fingertips tracing
the map of scars inscribed on the whales
as if reciting the whales’ lives back to them
one last time before the lights of this world extinguish, one
after another, after another, after another, after another.
One Last Moment in the Vast City of Ants
With subterranean housing for millions, it’s an abandoned city now,
left vacant. Imagine the labor it took to tunnel through, to carve out
each massive vault and to press forward, toiling without cease,
undaunted by the unyielding earth, resolute in the task, ants
tunneling passageways from one season to the next, each
with a lifespan of sixty days, at best, and still they pressed on,
generation by generation digging further into the sediment,
their claws and mandibles dismantling the hours set before them,
each destined to perish without seeing the vision to its end,
each glimpsing, perhaps, a sweeping monument of architecture
that later rendered scientists speechless by the scale of it.
Sunrise to sunset. Civilization by civilization.
When the city was alive with ants, the rains brought deluge,
storm-driven panic. Those on the surface were pummeled
by raindrops as large as the ants themselves, the water falling
through the empty sky from 2,500 feet above. Weak and strong alike
were carried away by floods, never to be seen by the colony again.
Those in the tunnels faced a torrent of water funneling down
with no end in sight, the roar of water and gravity their doom.
When scientists discovered this combed structure at their feet,
they poured several tons of concrete into vents and entryways—
flooding the passages and chambers below. Anything dead or alive
instantly entombed in liquid stone. Crews then removed the soil
in an area covering roughly five hundred square meters, eight meters
deep. They struggled to comprehend the planning, the logistics,
the social organization necessary to see it done.
In Brazil, where the excavated city lies open to the air, I imagine
one solitary ant pausing near the trees where the horizon-line
meets the sky. A small river of ants pass by, steadfast
in their labor and intention. And that lone ant, as curious a creature
as I am, looks back along the path as it chews a fibrous green leaf,
angling its anvil-shaped head now and then to consider the wind
swaying blades of grass in the valley below. Like some whisper
of the past. Some echo from long ago. Some old story about a city
lost in the earth, where the ancestors once rose in their multitudes
to take flight, a calamity in their wake which no one can remember
pushing them on into the green world still.
Brian Turner has a memoir, My Life as a Foreign Country, and two collections of poetry, Here, Bullet and Phantom Noise. These new poems are part of The Wild Delight of Wild Things (forthcoming from Alice James Books in 2023). He lives in Orlando with the world’s greatest golden retriever, Dene.
Read micro essays from Brian Turner appearing in Terrain.org: “The Lovers” and “The Mosquito” and “The Wandering Glider (Pantala flavescens)”.
Header photo by StockSnap, courtesy Pixabay.
