Ryan Warren Verse-Virtual 2017 May

May 2017

I live with my family by the sea in Northern California where we try and balance our time between music, books, movies, the outdoors, working, playing and being present for each other's lives. My poetry has previously appeared or is forthcoming in a number of journals, including California Quarterly, Wilderness House Literary Review and Firefly Magazine. More on my published works can be found at www.facebook.com/RyanWarrenPoetry.

By The Wind Sailors

sail across the ocean tops.

[A cosmopolitan genus
of free-floating hydrozoans
that live on the surface
of the open ocean.]

Blue jellied discs,
sometimes blown aground,
scattered across
morning beaches,
astride the tides
of sliding sea foam.

[Velella velella, small
Cnidaria commonly
known by the names
sea raft, by-the-wind sailor,
purple sail, little sail,
or simply Velella.]

We have named you
Velella velella.
We have named you
By-the-wind-sailor.
We have named you
Cnidaria,
Hydrozoan,
Anthomedusae,
Porpitidae,
Velella. We have named
your blue jellied bodies
your sea-worthy sails,
rigged on ridged backs.

This is how
we name things, twice.
One name in wonder,
By-the-wind-sailor.
Another so as to classify,
so as not to wonder,
Velella velella cnidaria hydrozoan,
about the whether
of blue jellied souls.

[Specialized predatory
gastropod mollusks
prey on these cnidarians.
Such predators
include nudibranchs (sea slugs)
in the genus Glaucus
and purple snails
in the genus Janthina.]

Like so, we have also
named the trees.
Plantae,
Embryophyte,
Sempervirens.
Coastal Redwood.
Trees, who even
as they sway silently
in the breeze, call
out to each other
through tubes
of underground fungi,
push chemical calls
through mushrooms:
Fire. Beetles. Axes.
Protect yourself,
embitter your bark,
change your nature,
draw in your water.

It took millennia
to begin to decode
the language trees speak,
and so what
can we really hope
to understand
about you, Velella?
The how of knowing?
The chemical what
of speaking?
The fear of sea slugs.
The creeping stomachs
of purple snails.

[These small Cnidaria
are part of a specialized
ocean surface community.
There is only one
known species,
Velella velella,
in the genus.]

What can we know
except about your proteins,
about the jellied flat disc of you,
about how we see you sail
across the ocean tops.

Nothing, except that we,
too, like you,
fellow Animalia,
are alone now
in our genus.
We, Homo sapiens,
a specialized and cosmopolitan
surface community.
We, Animalia,
Chordata,
Mammalia,
Primate,
Hominid.
Homo
sapiens.
'Wise.'

Big-brained bipeds
who tell ourselves lies
to sleep at night,
and write poetry,
and classify into kingdoms,
and fear creeping stomachs,
and cannot reconcile
the entanglements
of our quantum hearts
with the relativity
of our time bound bodies,
and never knew
that trees speak,

and so should
by now know
that we yet
[know]
nothing
of the universe,
or of you, Velella velella.

[We are all
by the wind sailors.]

Editor's Note: If this poem(s) moves you please consider writing to the author (email address above) to tell him or her. You might say what it is about the poem that moves you. Writing to the author is the beginning of community at Verse Virtual. It is very important. -FF