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The Enigmas

You would know what the crab weaves in the gold of its claws,
and I answer: Ocean will say it.
You ask what the luminous bell of the sea-squirt awaits in the
	water: what
does it hope for? I tell you, it waits for the fullness of time, like
	yourself.
For whom does the alga Macrocystis extend its embraces?
Unriddle it, riddle it out, at a time, in a sea that I know.
And the Narwhal's malevolent ivory? Though you turn for my
	answer, I tell you
you stay for a stranger reply; how he suffered the killing harpoon.
Or you look, it may be, for the kingfisher's plumage, a pulsation
of purest beginning in the tropical water.
Now, on the lucid device of the polyp you tangle
a new importunity, flailing it fine, to the bran:
you would sift the electrical matter that moves on the tines of the
	void;
the stalactite's splintering armor that lengthens its crystal;
the barb of the angler fish, the singing extension
that weaves in the depths and is loosed on the waters?

I would answer you: the Ocean knows it - the arc of its lifetime
is vast as the sea-sand, flawless and numberless.
Between cluster and cluster, the blood and the vintage, time
	brightens
the flint in the petal, the beam in the jellyfish;
the branches are threshed in the skein of the coral
from the infinite pearl of the horn.

I am that net waiting emptily - out of range
of the onlooker, slain in the shadows,
fingers inured to a triangle, a timid
half-circles dimensions computed in oranges.

Probing a starry infinitude,
I came, like yourselves,
through the mesh of my being, in the night, and awoke to my
	nakedness -
all that was left of the catch - a fish in the noose of the wind.
-- Pablo Neruda