Tessa

18

Letter from Meschers

Today I ran into a jellyfish
floating like a Sunday secret
in the shallows of the French estuary I am still a stranger to.
I thought it was a buoy rebounding
off my goose-bumped thigh,
until the current exposed a tendriled underbelly

The French word for “jellyfish” is méduse
“Comme Medusa”
I said to the twelve year old who translated this for me,
but he apparently had never heard of her
and I couldn’t remember the word for “snake”

The water here is heavy, weighed down with salt
and French ennui I suppose.
I know this because I float easy as le méduse,
my body lighter than this weighted ocean could ever hope to be.
I am comforted by the ambiguous density of the water,
it means I am unable to calculate the force needed
to pump it out of a swimming pool:
twelve by ten by
too much sand and salt and wind in this country
to worry about foot-pounds or meter-tons.
I can only estimate
that it would take the help of
ten thousand million méduses
to relieve the ocean of its’ heaviness