Sea Stars at Douarnenez
Asterias rubens
toiling in their red-orange sleeves, their five-armed symmetry. Throbbing.
Clambering over one another. Their way back to the sea blocked once
they’ve shinned into headwater pools behind the sea lock dam.
Gazing down from the crosswalk above, what is one to make of them,
distorted by shifting currents. Pulsing back and forth five meters
beneath the surface through kelp fronds, the clutter of long-sunk bottles
and cans washed down by the river. Why the reluctance to break one’s
gaze away? They sieve through themselves the river’s salt and freshwater
mix. Which is their blood. Their stomachs emerge from the centers of
themselves as they mount and envelope sea and river worms, snails,
mussels, clams, suctioning life from them. Sea stars don’t have brains.
So seamlessly are stars woven in with their environments. The briefest
shear-water gust scatters them into fragments of color and light.
Then they recollect themselves again. As if to demonstrate how
form is destiny. How stifling the limits of the brain. Starfish.
Sea stars. Metaphors. Holograms. Bending light. They are instrumental
in the bass thumping that is the world’s news. Cries of kittiwakes.
The dialectics of the tides. The planet’s spin. L’Église du Sacré-cour’s
choir practicing. The organ’s stops and starts and slides. Tectonic
plates trembling. Deep-sea vents spewing out the heat of chemosynthesis.