“Wrecked is the ship of pearl!”
…………..– Oliver Wendell Holmes
Nautilus: An Ode
I fantasize about inhabiting a nautilus, how each chamber
is bigger than the last, how the shell, when seawater
leaves a chamber, achieves
weightlessness,
how I could put down barriers like the creature,
how unoccupied spaces could grow, or how, in buoyant
separate rooms, we could find ourselves again
floating,
but we were so dissimilar in our turning, spiraling
away, so I have left you behind, wall by wall.
(No need to go back to our spira mirabilis.)
At great depths,
the shell implodes: I’m not going any deeper.
Inside now I, too, am nacre, mother
of pearl. Even if I crack, I isolate the fissure.
That’s how I could outgrow a shell, crawl its corridors,
feel my way through the smooth walls until suddenly—
light
(I am defenseless, but I am no longer inhabiting dread.)
by Elinor Ann Walker
from Plume Magazine