Tuesday poem: A persistence of jellyfish
March 3, 2015
a persistence of jellyfish
flesh liaisons bloom
sea-flowers have no soul
P.S. Cottier
‘sea-flowers…’is from Jules Verne, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
This bluebottle is the sort of lovely Australian creature that delights visitors. The image (PD Wiki Commons) is very fine, but doesn’t show the long tail of the creature, which is the bit that stings.
I have a vivid memory of swimming out of my depth, when one of these wrapped around my arm like a mad doctor’s blood pressure tester. I had to swim to shore, against a slight overtow, with a band of pain tightening around one of my arms. I developed a delightful weal on my arm, resembling a string of rubies given by a particularly sadistic Prince from a fairy tale by Angela Carter.*
At the time, I didn’t know how bad the sting of these creatures was, in terms of how poisonous. Fortunately, they are not too bad for most people, unlike the small invisible jellyfish found further north, which are deadly. (Some people have bad reactions to them though, as with bee-stings. See this article.)
Interestingly, the bluebottle is actually a co-operative of creatures that band together, rather than a single life-form. I believe that these are the sorts of things that we will find on other planets. ‘Other planets’ here means the south coast of NSW.
I believe that Australian wildlife may be touched on in the central Tuesday Poem this week. Press this link and find out.
*UPDATE: I have been flicking through other posts by Tuesday Poets, and just noticed that Helen Lowe is featuring a poem by Tim Jones about Angela Carter. There is an absence of jellyfish in the fine poem, but the coincidence tickled me. Like a bluebottle, but a lot less painful.
Poem: The pool
January 16, 2014
The pool
Time is swimming in the same lane as me.
Lapping me, laughing at my leisurely, languorous crawl.
He churns up the water, rude rapid muscled butterfly.
He should move to the lane marked fast,
And get out of this one marked slow.
Now Time swims slower, I have him at my shoulder.
I am still crawling, lazily elegant,
But he has broken into breaststroke, cloying and contained,
And so we swim side by side, companionably.
I am suddenly breathless, but way out in front.
Time dog-paddles, inefficient, no kick at all.
I can’t help winning.
I’ll soon hit the wall.
I can’t tumble turn.
P.S. Cottier
As the temperature in Canberra was 40 degrees celsius yesterday, and feels about the same today, I felt that a poem about swimming was called for. Swimming and death!
I went swimming at the Australian Institute of Sport pool earlier this week, and was quite pleased that I managed to do a kilometre (20 laps) as I haven’t swam in a proper pool for a while. Most of my water immersion activity (ah, the beauty of unnecessarily complicated expressions!) is undertaken at the beach these days.
But in 40 degrees, the pool seems the place to be, and one risks serious sunburn swimming outside in this weather, if one is as slow a swimmer as I am. Hilariously, a tourist one filmed me at the AIS, where the Australian swim team trains. He must have thought I was a proper swimmer. Given that I really can’t tumble turn, or dive, he must have a very strange idea of Olympic swimming!
‘The pool’ was first published in the Hand Luggage Only anthology, (UK) 2008, edited Christopher Whitby.
PS Cottier 