TRANSCRIPT

I’m Maggie Smith, and this is The Slowdown.

When we talk about the health of ocean ecosystems, I often hear the phrase “existential threat.” It’s a phrase that sounds massive. Because it is! It’s something so big that it’s hard to know what to do, how to make the right choices, as just one person.

Today’s poem probes those depths and finds an endless possibility of existence in the relationships between tiny beings.

Coral, Again
by Juliana Spahr

And the big, long waves surge
through the interreef passages
and break on the outermost reefs.
There a sea-foam is made
from the strong hydrodynamic forces.
A witness of sorts to tidal flows, surf zones,
these powerful turbulent jets and eddies
around the flanks of reef.
Beneath the whiteness,
the coral on the shallow bottom
rests its cells in the dappled sunlight.
And there also the single-celled algae.
Two forms of energy and capture these two,
as a lover and a beloved in a lyric.
When the waves are low there is sunlight
and so the holobiont is happy, growing.
When the water is turbid, when the light is limited,
the corals then eat the algae.
This too a form of happy.
By eating I mean the algae lives inside
the digestive cavity of the coral. 
By happy I mean the give and take of 
vitamins, trace elements, nutrients, carbon dioxide
that should be understood as the most primal of loves.
The lesson here is one of living in or on one another
so as to build, maintain, and defend. 
One could make a politics of it. 
This is what confused Ovid did.
Misunderstanding the coral as stone,
not understanding its life.
In his telling, Perseus created it when he
nestled Medusa’s head in plants
he found below the waves.
This was right after he slayed the sea monster
so as to win Andromeda.
Andromeda, she too was something else,
something impossible for him to recognize.
For she is lapped by sea-foam, as the Loeb puts it.
Meaning she was of this intertidal realm, 
of the coral and the algae.
When Perseus arrives he pulls her out and away.
And what follows is the supposed
first representation of a man falling in love
with a woman on a stage.
No one ever says anything about
Andromeda falling in love.
And of course, why would they?
Andromeda seems rather aware 
that her options are limited to slave or wife or servant.
Is it not all here, in a story retold so many times?
Is it not all we need to know about how hard 
it is for us to go forward?
And also all the ways possible?
Beneath the foam is all the symbiosis
that a Bakuninist could want.
A poet too; all the metaphor a poet could want.
All the choices for imagining survival
as living in or on one another
in the coral-rich intertidal zone
of Andromeda,
fish flickering in and out,
the big, long waves surging
through the interreef passages 
to break on the outermost reef where
a sea-foam is made 
from the strong hydrodynamic forces.
There, a witness too.
Tidal flows, surf zones, the flanks of reef. 

“Coral, Again” by Juliana Spahr from ARS POETICAS © 2025 Juliana Spahr. Used by permission of Wesleyan University Press.