A lion, a goat and a serpent.
Fire pouring from its mouth.
The ancients imagined such a creature
and called it a chimera.
Far beneath the surface of the ocean,
another chimaera moves through the darkness.
A strange-eyed, long-tailed fish,
sometimes called a ghost shark,
although it isn’t really a shark at all.
One breathes fire.
The other inhabits water.
Both carry a name bestowed by someone
attempting to describe what they encountered.
I wonder whether either creature
experiences itself as particularly strange.
Does the lion question the presence of the goat?
Does the serpent object to sharing a body
with something that breathes fire?
Or does the entire creature simply
go about the business of being alive?
Perhaps contradiction belongs less
to the creature than to the observer.
We are so fond of naming things.
Sorting them. Establishing what belongs
with what, what cannot possibly coexist,
what makes sense and what does not.
As though the naming were the knowing.
Water offers another possibility.
Stand above it and you see the sky reflected.
Look beneath the reflection and another world appears.
Enter it and everything changes.
The surface is familiar.
The depths have their own peculiar stillness.
But between them lies the passage.
Currents pull against the body.
Light shifts. Pressure increases.
Familiar bearings disappear.
What was readily understood from above
becomes something else entirely
when experienced from within.
And the body must negotiate every inch of the descent.
There is no arriving at the depths without passing through the water.
Perhaps this is where so much of living actually occurs.
Not in the certainty of what we believe we know,
nor in the eventual clarity of what we discover,
but in the unsettled territory between them.