Velella velella

Rebecca Knight

The moment I leave the threshold
I collect a faceful of thin rain.
The sky is so soupy, so full of water
That it just hangs there
Waiting to be plucked.

I think South Jetty must surely be the end of the world,
The way the land is slanting,
And the wind blows,
As if to dip us into the sea.

Sikuliaq is out of port,
But Elakha is there
Floating below the dock,
Looking like a can of Coors,
Practically blending into the sky.

It’s June,
And the sun shines on every place in the Northern Hemisphere except this one.

Crabs, all deconstructed, are laid by the tides,
Or crabivorous birds,
In curved lines on the aerated,
Holey sand.

The beach grass is crawling towards salt water it can’t drink,
And I can sense its strange mission from a dierent height, a dierent lifespan altogether.
It’s wrapped in the dried-up gelatinous corpses of the Velella,
Which washed up in April in great hordes.

I saw them fresh,
Perfect lapis.
The ones biggest, bluest, most tentacled, fullest of water, I collected.
As many as I could carry
To the locked dock gate.
Under which was deeper water,
And a tall, terric heron.
There, I pinched them by their sails and threw them as hard as I could, and they made the water by only a few feet.

They had been washing up all over Oregon for weeks.
This happens every year,
Every year for millenia.
They cannot swim.

What makes them so special is what they do insteadCatching the wind on their half-moon sail,
Striated like your ngerprint,
Lifted and lowered in accordance with
Decentralized brilliance.
Only they
Hang on the ocean’s ceiling,
Full of sky and oating like a raft,
At the atmospheric interface,
Tentacles hanging down into the warmest,
Sun-close water,
Full of phytos,
Which I imagine taste like green grapes.

They sail by the wind
Until a wave smashes their delicate form into grit, cli, or rock,
Where the ocean can’t get them back,
And they can’t get away
From what comes next.

There wasn’t any use.
The tide would push them right back where I found them,
And they were all almost certainly dead already.

But I couldn’t have left them on the rocks if I tried.
It was likely for nothing.

Likely for me.
For me to be able to hold them and carry them and whisper lovely secrets to them before throwing
them a pathetic distance and change not the oceanic circulation or the movement of hydrozoans
anywhere.
To be with them,
While I balanced and scrambled up the rocks in oce shoes with them in my hands
And I tried not to hurt them more.

There’s nothing wrong with dying on the beach at South Jetty like God intended.

Nothing really wrong with that.
But my will was not free.

Do I hope they were all long dispatched before I found them,
Released into the wind that carried them here?
Or do I hope one of them
Was still a little awake?
Do I hope that it’s nerve net untensed,
When he hit the water again?
Do I hope he wasn’t afraid?
That the pain receded?

Ella Ciffone

Biography: I love to create anything and everything. I find a lot of inspiration in nature and it is my favorite to photograph.

Artist Statement: This piece explores the visceral connection between humanity and nature, inviting reflection on the fragility of life and the primal ties binding us to the natural world.

Rebecca Knight

Biography: I am a third-year Oceanography student, originally from Bend, Oregon.

Artist Statement: After getting out of a lab day at the Hatfield, I was waiting for the bus by OSU dock, and I saw the beach covered with the by-the-wind sailors. I had seen them before, but never so many, and never any so freshly beached.