Barnacle

I cut myself on a four hundred

year old barnacle. It was my fault.

I strayed into its seaside territory

by mistake. The ocean ambushed

me in the beach’s narrowed alley.

Cursed in a language before blue.

Its wine-dark shoulder-charge

knocked me onto its cobblestoned

street; my hand parachuted open,

launching like a grappling hook, but

gravity hid behind my legs & pulled.

Its edge opened up my palm neat

as a pay envelope’s promise. It

was part of a razor gang after all,

its cutthroat mates flashed shivs too.

Hard to imagine their cave hideout,

a distant cousin to the Himalayas was

once a mass of lifeless sea creatures;

fishbones, bleached coral, mother

of pearl, shell, grit rasped into smooth

particles by the tide’s kinetic sawmill

& risen as mountainous tomb.

Darwin studied them. Rubbed his

stiff fingers over their stars, old as an

Elizabethan dirk. He knew an organism

that lived so long, must know something

about morphology, longevity. Measured

their jagged coastlines, counted bubbles

that escaped from their miniature craters

He cut himself too, proffering his own

blood for science’s spell. His revelation.

The simplest live longest, the complex

die sooner from too many moving parts.

Anyhow, my hand opened its red smile,

& rebirthed its salt back into the mother

country’s briny womb. My blood oozed

in hot waves, as the flap of skin undulated

like a polyp helpless in a strong undersea

current. This stigmata; blessed ultramarine

pain as though light itself filleted my flesh,

each beam a butcher’s knife. That was then.

The scar is bone white as the string of dead

coral & cuttlefish backbone left by a high tide.

My children’s children’s children will see it die.

B. R. Dionysius