Jellyfish

.

1.

Cauls of the moon

pulled from the sky

at high tide, cauls from blue

new-born babies

who never got the chance

to breathe.

2.

Peeled like the thin

wrap of plums,

these are the curious

outer skins of brains

adapted to Atlantis,

their thinking so whimsical

and clear.

3.

See-through umbrellas

for the fanciful

and unaware. They could

eat your whole head

if you stood still

in what you thought was rain.

.

.

Thoreau Said a Walk Changes the Walker

.

A rainforest changes the man,

it changes the woman.

Some were born with rivers

in their blood. Their ancestors

spoke to raven and bear,

spoke to wolf and otter and black fish,

spoke to salmon and eagle and frog and heron.

You speak to them, too,

and they talk back. Sometimes

you’re close to grasping what they say—

that’s one way the rainforest

changes you.

One day at dusk a bear

walks through the eye

of the camera.

The old ones claim

a man lives inside a bear;

you tell no one

a bear lives inside a man.

There are weeks in the forest

when your whole body is

a word even you can’t utter

but the trees, in their

deep listening,

hear.

.

.

Wolves

.

The wildness in you has gone out

to meet the wolves who are hunting

along the shore. You can’t see

this wayward part of you

the way you see your breath in winter,

but you feel the bite of canine teeth

as if you now live

in the throat of a stricken deer.

You’ve never understood before

what beauty means, how it

blasts the blood and leaves you

shaken, demanding more

than you can ever,

in this human body, be.



These poems first appeared in The Wild in You (Greystone Books, 2015). Reprinted with permission.

Photo credit: fried-egg jellyfish (Phacellophora camtschatica) by Flickr user by and by CC BY-SA 2.0.

Lorna Crozier received the Governor General’s Award for Poetry and three Pat Lowther Awards for the best book of poetry by a Canadian woman. She’s been granted five honourary doctorates, most recently from Simon Fraser and McGill Universities, and has read her poetry on every continent except Antarctica. The most recent of her seventeen books of poetry are God of Shadows and The House the Spirit Builds. A Professor Emerita at the University of Victoria, she lives on Vancouver Island with a cat, two turtles, and many fish.