'The Aquarium'
Judith Beveridge
The weirdest things are the tiny cuttlefish,
the ones whose translucent, gelatinous faces
are hung with the rippling curtains
of their feeding tentacles. Their locomotion-frills are wafting too,
fine as chiffon.
The sign says there’s a stonefish in this tank,
though you can barely see it
covered with the rocky ornamentations, with the green and lilac
encrustations of the pool itself.
Now a jellyfish pulses by. I can see four white gonads
through the body-wall.
This one’s trailing-filaments end in large purple knobs.
I imagine holding a jellyfish
would take a cosmetic surgeon’s steady hands,
someone used to manoeuvring
the wobbly sacs of breast implants.
This tank is as glossy and bright as a brochure
of a temperate rocky shore.
It’s full of anemones whose tentacles suddenly flare
around the perimeters of their mouths
with the supple, progressive ease of Mexican waves.
The tentacles radiate out in rows
as though they were circles
of colourful, feeding fish.
These sea urchins are as scarlet and as prickly as rambutans,
there are so many, I feel as though I’m peering into the hollow
in a wave-swept reef.
A spotted pipefish drifts out of a hole
and for a moment
looks like a stray strand of kelp or eelgrass you sometimes see
wound through the links of old boat chains.
The tank is also full of skates, stingrays,
eagle rays, stingarees. I watch their edges undulate
with all the yielding tonicity of mollified rubber
as they sweep around the glass.
This skate looks as thick and broad as a tropical leaf;
this one’s edges swirl and fan out as if the tank-water
were being pumped with the submerged, weighted rhythms
of cello, oboe
and the slow thrumming of a lyre.
On its underside, this stingray has two dark spiracles
and deep gill-slits set in its bright white skin.
It could almost be a ghost floating around a cold, wide ceiling
with that quadrangular disc-shape
changing, fading away almost to nothing at the edges.
Two turtles are swimming together
and suddenly I remember:
The dance was slow, was slow, was slow. Slow was the dance, very.
The dancer turned, her arms held out as she came closer, slowly.
An eel projects its long-tubed nostrils out of a crevice.
Its head is thin, compressed, swollen
behind the eyes.
I step back when it unrolls across the glass like a stocking-full of slime.
Now blue-finned leatherjackets, big-eye trevally, candy wrasse,
painted anglerfish, grouper and rock whiting do another circuit of the tank.
Their pictures are displayed around the perimeter
like mugshots of fleshy-lipped, thick-browed thugs.
A small fortune of aqua light is falling into the tank, making it glow
like a milky sapphire, like mother-of-pearl.
In the next tank I watch an octopus luxuriate in its own arms,
then languidly roll them around itself as if it were looking
for a loophole,
then it loosely lets them out
far beyond its head and mantle, each arm moving as though it had
taken up a quill
and were writing over and over in slanting, looping letters:
lollygag, lollipop, lollapalooza
on the tank-water, on the pebbles and the rising stream of bubbles.
Down the ramp there is a pool of seals
and one has worked its way onto the platform where later it will perform
by keeping a ball balanced on its nose
while clapping its flippers;
from here it looks as shiny as a piece of sculpted tourmaline.
I walk to the next tank and watch a platoon of cruising
gummy sharks. A mass of aerating bubbles
is pouring like a small Milky Way over their backs as they slide
up to the surface – they do not know about the length
of purchase the bubbles, sand, or glass
will have on their days. A grey nurse shark glides forward
with an air of absolutism.
Its mouth seems a fortification, a compound. It commands
its regiment of fins, but looks so unreal, lifeless,
as though it were made of fibreglass, or some seamless,
polished plastic.
I go back to watch the octopus again whose arms now
seem to be conducting music to four distinct orchestras.
Then it plays with one of the small rings put there for its amusement –
and in a flash
as though it were a length of voile or Dacca silk, it draws
all four meters of itself through the ring’s small hole
shape-shifting then tightening
its small face against the glass before it holds the rim
of the ring again, and it draws itself back through
as if into another portal, another hole in space.
But even after this, it’s that shark I can’t forget –
how its eyes keep staring, colder than time – how it never
stops swimming,
how it never closes its mouth.
NB: The quoted lines are the first stanza of James Galvin’s poem ‘Girl without Her Nightgown’ published in The Best American Poetry 2008, ed. by Charles Wright, Scribner Poetry, New York, 2008, p. 37.
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