Transcript

I’m Ada Limón and this is The Slowdown.

Last night I dreamt that I was underwater and speaking to the great mysterious animals that live under the surface of the sea. This is not unusual. I often dream that I am underwater. I dream of fish so often that I’ve learned to remember my dreams just by asking myself to remember where the fish were in the dream. In the myriad of dream dictionaries populating the internet, water seems to represent one’s emotional life.

This seems a little too on the nose for a poet. So, I dream about my emotions? Aren’t all dreams representative of emotions? Still, there is truth to how the mystery of the ocean is an ongoing obsession for some of us. Who didn’t love The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau? Many of us would love to plummet under the veil of the ocean and discover what other animals roam the salty depths.

Apparently over 80% of the world’s oceans remain unexplored. And according to the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Association, 91% of ocean species have yet to be classified. Perhaps my dreams are simply exploration, curiosity, a desire to see what lurks under the water we know so little about? Or maybe I want to be undiscovered myself.

In today’s skillful poem, we see the speaker recognize themselves in strange beasts. One of the reasons I love this poem is that it offers us not just an understanding of what being isolated underwater might be like. It also shows us what it’s like to be capable of making your own light.

Bioluminescence
by Paul Tran

There’s a dark so deep beneath the sea the creatures beget their own
light. This feat, this fact of adaptation, I could say, is beautiful

though the creatures are hideous. Lanternfish. Hatchetfish. Viperfish.
I, not unlike them, forfeited beauty to glimpse the world hidden

by eternal darkness. I subsisted on falling matter, unaware
from where or why matter fell, and on weaker creatures beguiled

by my luminosity. My hideous face opening, suddenly, to take them
into a darkness darker and more eternal than this underworld

underwater. I swam and swam toward nowhere and nothing.
I, after so much isolation, so much indifference, kept going

even if going meant only waiting, hovering in place. So far below, so far
away from the rest of life, the terrestrial made possible by and thereby

dependent upon light, I did what I had to do. I stalked. I killed.
I wanted to feel in my body my body at work, working to stay

alive. I swam. I kept going. I waited. I found myself without meaning
to, without contriving meaning at the time, in time, in the company

of creatures who, hideous like me, had to be their own illumination.
Their own god. Their own genesis. Often we feuded. Often we fused

like anglerfish. Blood to blood. Desire to desire. We were wild. Bewildered.
Beautiful in our wilderness and wildness. In the most extreme conditions

we proved that life can exist. I exist. I am my life, I thought, approaching
at last the bottom of the sea. It wasn’t the bottom. It wasn’t the sea.

"Bioluminescence" by Paul Tran, from ALL THE FLOWERS KNEELING by Paul Tran, copyright © 2022. Used by permission of Penguin Random House.