Admittedly, there is something about its face,
the boxy pugilistic snout, the prehistoric eyes
that seem to stare down through
80 million years back to the very days of T-rex.
Though taxonomically the frilled shark is no snake
cutting through the lightless waters 5,000 feet down,
the creature looks to be the very essence
of the reptilian brain—cold-blooded, beyond
even the crocodile, that seemingly soul-less
armory of plates, a creature grounded wholly in the now
with no inner life beyond the moment. What would it be
to be this presence skirting through the dark
with its rows of teeth, a consciousness beyond mind
that watches what mind does, its sorrows,
a being that grows its young for three and a half years
in the dark night of its belly, the longest gestation
of any in the animal kingdom, and how it only comes to us
from time to time, pulled up in some fisherman’s net
for all to behold the undying wonders of the sea?
To have lived on into the anthropocene,
this creature mostly blind, simply structured, unchanging,
feeding on small squids and fishes, others of its kind—
please don’t misunderstand. I believe God does not exist
in time, but because we do, we cannot understand It.
But imagine eighty million years, passing second by second.
When I look at this silvery beast, I see God.
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From Auction: Poems by Quan Barry. Copyright © 2023. Reprinted with permission from the University of Pittsburgh Press.
