Nothing lived on land, nothing had
crawled out of the shallow sea.
Because they have no hard parts,
it’s rare to find the fossil of a jelly.
The farm boy digging a new duck pond
exposed thousands, like old verbs
stranded on the shore of the lonely
Paleozoic; nothing came to eat them,
nothing was sloshing in the shrimpdom.
A see-through diving bell as formal as a ghost,
the giant medusa waved her oral arms to subtilize her food.
Who said life unfolds in language?
Nothing lived on land, nothing had
crawled out of the shallow sea.
Kathleen Halme’s first book of poetry, Every Substance Clothed,was the winner of the University of Georgia Press Contemporary Poetry Series competition. Her second collection, Equipoise, was published by Sarabande Books. Halme is a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowship. She lives in Portland, Oregon.
