Coda Barbara Hurd
A GALAXY AT OUR FEET
The sky is pink this morning
and on the shore a whole host
of sea stars has been stranded.
I know from the charts the moon was full
last night, the midnight tide higher than
usual. Were the skies clear? Were the stars
out? I’d like to have seen these creatures
then: stars in the dark overhead and here a
spiny constellation draped over the rocks.
One of the largest, a northern sea star,
now lies upside down in the palm of my
hand. Almost a foot across, its orangy
body glistens wet in the dawn light.
Hundreds of slender tubes wriggle like
antennae, only these aren’t sense organs;
they’re feet, and what they’re searching
for isn’t food or enemy or mate, but
something to cling to, any >rm surface
that can anchor them and end this futile
?ailing at the air.
Of its >ve arms, three remain, >ve or
six inches long. I’ve read that most sea
stars lose their limbs to other sea stars’
hunger. Traveling in slow-motion swarms,
the lead contingent feasts on oysters and
clams, depleting the supply for those in
the rear, who resort to the nearest neighbor’s arm. The sea star, of course, can
regenerate when the food supply increases,
grow back the missing limb, and continue
unburdened by notions of heroism or
sacri>ce, even consciousness.
We, in contrast, have to live with those
burdens, made heavier by loss and the
sensation that often emanates from
what’s missing. Amputees call it phantom
pain, those sensations—tingling or sharp
stabs—by which something absent makes
its presence known. Even those born without a limb sometimes feel what was never
there and experience, physically, what
others of us know psychologically—a need
to con>rm what we feel but can’t see.
When its third arm begins to wriggle,
I turn the sea star over and carry it back to
the water. Oblivious to patience or my
unreliable intentions, it knows only the
dangers of drying out set against the
dangers of being washed out to sea. I try
to imagine that twice-daily rhythm, sun
on its baking back, tube feet squishing as
it inches along among drying seaweed
and barnacles. And then the >erce holding on as the tide comes in and wave after
wave crashes on top of delicate tissues.
Were the stars out last night? Silly
question, really. They’re always out. In the
daytime too. Where do we think they’d
go? I try to remember this: the obscuring
e=ect of clouds and of sunlight, how
things that seem to disappear often have
not. Up in the daytime sky, the whirling
constellations—Cassiopeia, Orion, Big
Dipper—may be invisible to us, but stage
a noontime solar eclipse and there they
are, as always, reminders of other worlds
we’ll probably never see. And here, underfoot, half a dozen sea stars, about to
disappear underwater where they’ll go
on too, misshapen maybe and less visible,
doing what they’ve always done: making
their slow way through a galaxy spread
out at our feet.
Foaming and inching its lunar way up
the beach, the sea polishes small stones,
sloshes into and out of the tiny whorled
and bivalved shells somersaulting in the
undercurl of its waves. I take it as a given
we can’t escape the way the world grinds
the living into debris. But before it does,
there’s a chance for the lucky encounter
with someone or something—a painting
or poem, a place—that can beckon to
what lies broken and hungry inside us all.
I believe it’s what most of us long for.
Oh Ahab, I often think, if you could
have hunted with less vengeance and
fewer absolutes, might the whale have
someday returned to you what it took so
long ago, so violently? Not literally, no leg,
of course. Not even in a story would anyone believe a human could do what a sea
star can. But something else, something
elusive that retreats in the onslaught of
high drama and >erce truths, that survives
between the layers of the said and the felt,
and makes itself known to us only by the
ghostly presence of its wanting. a
