From the sea’s memory whose immensity I cannot encompass, she takes a mass of limestone and with one tool – a drop of water – she brings forth a sculpture of all she has ingested and turned inside out in a new formation. Seamounts and guyots miniaturized. Carcinomorphic legs dangle within the stalactites. She carves in with trilobite strokes across the pregnant columns. She freezes in time the way she gushed over countless rocks with flowstone. Amid an astroidal firmament, batoids swirl on the vaulted ceiling whose cetaceous slabs dive down into the abyss. Textures from ancient reefs and sponges crawl under the floor. Cambrian plants rise again in stone. Burrows memorialized in soda straws. The whole chamber curling into a giant nautilus. In the darkest crevices, mimoids gestate. And she finishes it with the simple drip that fills the hollow of her new instrument. The sound of one drop into her fathomless memory. A sound she makes across innumerable planets. Her cephalopodous existence stretches over the galaxies that emerge from her womb.
Ha, ha! You really had fun with this one, Peter! I had a lot of fun reading it too.
I consider myself to be a reasonably well-educated and well-informed person, but in approximately 200 words, I found 8 words I needed to look up…words from zoology, geology, and even science fiction. A few other words I figured out from the context.
Thank you for helping me to build my vocabulary. The pictures are beautiful!
Have a great day!
Cheryl
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Sweet! It warms the cockles of my heart that you found it so fun! 🍄🙏🍄
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Beautiful. The words and the photographs.
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Thank you! I meditated on this for years until these words came to me. 🙏🙏🙏
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I dropped into a space…
a vastness, scarred a little in its distant walls, from having waited so long to bring me home…
fell out of the world I knew
and found the fresh radiance of newly-stirred stars
in all I had once considered darkness.
Here at last,
riding on the coat-tails of cuttlefish starships,
I knew why I loved it so much.
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And through the clouds of my ink I see a bioluminescent glow coming from your direction. 🍄🙏🍄
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This is beautiful! Stalactites and stalagmites are so magical.
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Right? And they imprint themselves in the mind in the most curious way. Thank you.
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