Phantom Bottom
by Molly Kugel
In 1946, sonar detected what appeared to be the bottom of the ocean, but it was a body suspended between the surface and the seabed. The “Phantom bottom” moved up and down and was later discovered to be millions of small fish.
This is the place
of animals
in darkness,
the sea forest
questioned,
wondering about rising,
the squid feeding
on plankton,
late evening,
at the surface
of wave,
this layer, the deep
scattering one,
born of a reflection,
sonar upon
silver sliver,
bioluminescence
of lanternfish,
the swimbladders
of mesopelagic fish,
millions of them,
mistaken for
a false seafloor—
though this place is
so much of where
animals
live in daylight,
soft ground
of grasses,
bright mornings
of early summer
and early love,
early shadow
and daydream,
the same
because we don’t
hear them—
they are unknown
to us in the way
they once were
known or could have been—
now they serve a need,
live in crates,
with fences
and we turn away—
we refuse
them and we
won’t see them
in this phantom place—
it’s underwater,
breathing in your ears,
tinnitus or meditative vanishing,
the way understanding
requires a clear field,
a limelight on stage,
an acquiescence in twilight,
but there is a whole life
that we don’t know
like them running
through the meadows,
like us moving out of the way—
it is sound,
the distance back to
what we all know of the sunlit,
of walking, of rescue, of days now gone,
an urus sleeping in a clover lea.
~
Molly Kugel is the author of Groundcover (Tolsun 2022), and the chapbooks, sky, lotus, dust (dancing girl press 2023) and The Forest of the Suburbs (Five Oaks 2015). Her poems have appeared most recently in Plant-Human Quarterly, Bennington Review, Mid-American Review, Cider Press Review, and Josephine Quarterly. She earned her PhD in English and Literary Arts at the University of Denver, teaches writing for the University of Colorado Denver, and is the Ecology Editor for Cordella Press.
Featured image: Photograph by Alex Rose, 2017.
Artist’s note: The poems are part of a larger project, Carson, a biographic sequence of poems on Rachel Carson which utilizes the language and ritual of Gaelic Incantations, Charms, and Blessings of the Hebrides to undergird the life of Carson in order to investigate the gendered response many critics had to Carson’s science. The specific poems I’ve chosen for this issue could be characterized as offering a hopeful warning about the absurdly limited anthropocentric perspective that many scientists (like Carson) and naturalists in history have been warning us about for centuries. Some of the poems communicate a reckoning with this moment in time and ask readers to pause and truly consider a biocentric perspective and a unity with flora and fauna, which some say could be the first step back to resurgence and regeneration.
