Immortal Jellyfish

Adrift on Sea World bed-sheets at age 5,
I snuggled, sinking into sleep when the Great
White Truth grabbed me: “I’m going to die.
It’s going to hurt. And I can’t get out of it.”

Ponce de Leon, ransacking gator-glades
for youth, was doomed (I’d learn) to fail.
Priests, whipping the meringue of Afterlife
which no one wakes to taste—full fail.

Achilles, whose mom dipped him like a Tastee
Freeze cone in the Styx—epic fail.
Even Sibyl, shriveled bean-in-a-jar, begging
for the end—fail, fail, fail, fail! Yet

all the while, looking like a red-faced cartoon-
chef trapped in a lightbulb,
you were sweetening the ocean’s bouillabaisse.
Like other jellies, you start life as a polyp,

then mature—jellyfish acne, first date,
prom, marriage, babies, middle age.
But then, instead of (like us) riding
life’s relentless current into the Abyss,

you reverse, becoming a polyp again. Yes,
you’ll die if you become part of the plankton
some whale inhales by the ton. Otherwise,
you don’t have to! You’ll never spend

your life-savings being tortured by doctors
who’ll mumble, finally, “nothing we can do.”
Your kids won’t have to choose the right hospice for you.
So what if you’re five millimeters long?

Turritopsis nutricula, you know the answer
no human has guessed, though most have tried—
you with no brain to relish what you’ve done,
no lungs to express relief’s long sigh.

Abyssal Plain
     — For A.J., 1985 – 2020

It’s deep. Extremely. So supremely deep,
the sea above it makes Lake Michigan
seem thin as a smear. No air; less light.

All photons absorbed. Not even the glimmer
of a memory of an idea of light,
though nearly half the planet’s surface hides

down there. It’s cold—so cold, a whale
carcass, sunk 10,000 feet, would survive
centuries, except for hagfish, congers, blind

sharks and, of course, bacteria. Life hangs on.
Balanced by thin fins, the tripod-fish
snaps up death-manna the sea showers down.

Urchins scour the endless miles, tube-feet
probing for mates in the desolation.
People, too—the deeply sad, whose lab tests

come back horrible, whose kids are burned
to death or crushed in cars, or their tests
come back horrible; those who wake in hospitals

with something desperately wrong; those
who’ve trudged down a long decline for years—
their shadows move across earth’s surface,

darkening its light; but they are lost on the abyssal
plain, wandering where, even if they pass
an inch from someone, neither knows—

where if, by miracle, two touch, they glide
right through, bearing their grief until they find
some chimney furred with tube-worms,

some vent where water hot as molten lead
spurts from the earth’s gashed hide. There,
with the most profound relief, they seep inside.

— Charles Harper Webb

In our ECO LIT series, Red Canary Magazine dedicates space for established writers and emerging voices to imagine better ways of being.