Aristotle’s Lantern

O
urchin
you were once
a sharp-boned crystal
set against the world of flesh
and here we find you all abreath
pores pulsing, beautifully puffed with life,
soft, unsought answers nestled in your spiny test,
a testament of deep-sea symmetry; and so I wished
to wish away your tubercles in micro-zoom like swollen nipples,
oh, your terrifying spongy periproct, a gorgon’s eye on which a greek
philosopher could fix and die, but here we are, this too is nature’s work
and what a wonder it has wrought from carbon, calcium, and certain processes
at which I mustn’t look for very long (the whisper-sting of arsenic, the clamour of magnesium)
and if I were a crystal I would not (or even if I were this five-fold star which has sucked in
the garden name we tamed it with) attempt to draw a moral from the shell-hard fact
that under sufficient pressure and urged not to die, we will, given half the chance
turn into anything, take on whichever shape we find the prettiest with what
we have, as long as we can breathe, but if we need to, we will rear
those spines which lurk inside of us, race memory of edges,
here we are again, midway between a peach and a grenade;
though if I were a bobbing statement lamp of echinoid,
hoovering algae, streaming milt behind me like
confetti, I might never know how crystal-sharp
my spines, never imagine carbon coalescing
one day into thinking meat who somehow
with a graphite tooth declares and
somehow it makes sense
we know what we are
but not what
we may
be