Sandra Meek
Still Life with Evolution: Amblyrhynchus cristatus (Marine Iguana), Fernandina, Galápagos
Still Life with Evolution: Amblyrhynchus cristatus (Marine Iguana), Fernandina, Galápagos
Never was a dry eye into the continent; never a land bridge, but a raft
of storm trash, and twisted into the trees’ risen roots, woven
into wreaths of floating mangrove, the long-snouted ancestor
theory, that captain’s companion Darwin, stumbled into their
beginning from. That human eyes, like a bird’s, can mirror
the viewer, can hold her as a tiny floating thing, is a condition,
not the accomplishment, of empathy. Which is weightless
as these skeletons a wind skitters, wedging to crooks
between rocks the curved spines, vertebrae puzzled knuckle
to knuckle—some like antique-ivory combs, the teeth
snapped off; some still rayed with ribs like the straws
of lost-wax castings, splayed to a galley’s oars, stalled
as the day the sea glassed and the Spanish bishop’s sails
unspooled, drawing him near enough to be appalled
less by their hundreds’ braiding to a mass ropy
as the pāhoehoe bones bearing them, than by their likeness,
that face isolation’s million generations had blunted
so near his own. Scaled to minute pyramids, Brutalist
castles, the forehead is distance ranged as caldera-capped peaks.
A lace skull cap of sneezed salt. Because what sustains, too long
held, poisons, and what they must eat swells so richly
with it, the moats lacing the scales’ pinnacled plates pulse
neon-green with the crystalline desiccation of seaweed
the largest will dive for, straight into the frigid surf
dropping them, degree by degree, towards muscles’ freeze
and no more rising. So tuned to what haloes, half their work
is warming, spread-eagled, bean-bag heavy against a shelf
of black rock all glass and pocketed air where flat
on my stomach I lay to meet the cabbed gembones
of one’s eyes. So close, my breath—were this some
northern winter—might have gloved him. Yet no flinch,
no turn. To be held in such trust is to be at once
invisible and so deeply seen that no reflection mars
the eye, unblinking: though in truth, this grace they’ll grant
anything not hawk, their one predator on this still
cat-free island. Nothing here yet feral. Nothing yet slipping
into burrows, sliding their leathery eggs down throats
fluent as five centuries of naming weighting their backs
like the hawk, descending, who could not both fight
and lift the heaviest, who must press his prey against
the noon-warmed stone until it stills. Imps of Darkness.
Hideous Creatures. Cooking the body in its own skin,
not to death but paralysis, flipping it, ripping into the soft
belly to begin. Tiny T-Rex. Mini Godzilla. Ancient Days Come
Once More to Earth. The mockingbird’s alert call the one
sound true: a one-noted, deep-throated strobe meaning hawk
they’ve learned to distinguish from the bird’s
trilling song. To survive a lean year, the seaweed’s
dying down, they’ll digest their own bones: the pattern
was predictable; a year’s warmed water to be followed
by many more, cooling. Those with the deepest hunger,
who could not hold out even a single season: those skeletons
are theirs, lacing the black boulders, devolving
toward air. Good bones, we say of a house worth saving.
Good bones. Such stiff grace, such sinuous
articulation, the long tails propelling them
through the rough current, the limbs, their outsized
claws, held tight and still against the rigid torso,
the dorsal crest’s ash-green spines a fringed fin
arcing the surface it parts. The architecture of the body
is ark and cage, and home is another island’s harbor
where a grounded hull, listing starboard, ribbons out oil
silking to an iridescent skin. Beauty isn’t beauty, isn’t
truth, what cannot be scooped in nets,
what cannot be scrubbed from the chosen few plucked
from blackened beaches: the temperature scaling beyond
the seaweed’s bearing. Unchained offshore, my ship
purrs. I was never harmless, though I lay as still
as a breathing body might. Cooling by facing head-on
the heat, the colony orients entire towards the noon sun,
their silence punctuated, as with coughs in a darkening
theater, by this sibilance, expelling the one poison
they’d been gifted a world of time to grow to. Never will be
a land bridge. Never is a dry eye into every continent.
In my breath, the flood and the fire
rising. And beyond, the sound of a great gathering,
listening.