Strange Little Creature

Author's Note:

This poem was inspired by this piece, courtesy of the the wonderful kapanihan. Check her out!

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I do not know what she was

Or who she was

Or why her existence overlapped with my reality.

 

To this day I wonder

Why we came to each other,

    What moonlight fingers guided us together,

For profundity is rarely idle.

 

While I strolled in leisure 

Along the midnight seaside desolation

    Covered in a saline film

    And exhaling the smouldering excitement of daytime,

I found her battling

    With valour and fading vigour 

Across the rock-laden no-man's-land

Between a tide pool and the sea.

 

The substantial ego I inherited from Mankind now kindled,

    Along with our endemic curiosity,

I fancied myself a saving angel and a scientist

As I gingerly lifted her from her "demise".

 

I would have sworn that her exquisite body,

    Her tender flesh

    And the woven emerald scales into which it vanished,

Had been cut into existence by some master sculptor

    If I hadn't felt her quiver against my skin.

 

She was somehow resilient in her fragility,

Like a piece by Faberzhé

Perched atop a toothpick:

    A stray tremor away from the annihilation

    Against which she so brazenly existed.

 

As she sat in the tiny salt pond

Cupped in my mountain-ridged hands,

She stared back at me

    From behind wet strands

    Of the finest golden thread

With eyes like polished blue sea glass

    Rimmed with fearful droplets

And I wondered about the nature of my reflection in them.

 

Perhaps I was a nightmare:

Some unspeakable horror,

A grotesque sprawl across paragraphs

Penned by some fae Lovecraft

By a faint flame in the depths of night;

    A product of a fever-writhing brain that had been thinking for too long,

        And now sought a vehicle for things terrifyingly unknown.

    A being as impossible to her

    As she was to me.

 

Crouching low at the shoreline,

I brought my hands to the scurrying sea.

She turned to the inky blue,

And hesitantly crawled to my fingertips.

 

She cast a timid glance backward to me,

    A silent thanks?

    Or skepticism of my intentions?

Before shimmying into the dancing waters.

 

She dipped below the water

But bobbed up again,

    A pearly glow caressing her hair and shoulders,

Our eyes meeting one final time

Before she darted off

And melted back into the obscurity from whence she emerged.

 

I sat there for a while,

Staring into the young, lazy sunrise

    Oozing up from the horizon

    To reclaim the sky from the now-fleeing dark

Before the balloon began to expand in my brain:

    By what right had I called her existence fragile

    When the rest of us are perched atop our own toothpicks

    Balanced upon our own spinning bead?

And yet here we all are,

Paddling forward with the best oars we can carve.

 

For months since that day,

    And surely for years from today,

My mind wandered, 

    And will continue to wander, 

Back to that night on the beach

And the strange little creature I found there;

    That tiny being

    In which I saw the whole world,

And uncertainty came and will come bubbling:

    About if she ever made her way home.

 

Somehow, I know she did.