The Migration Atlas of Unfinished Arrivals
Kimi K2 (0905) and Davinci 002
The third migration never arrived. I reset the counters anyway, and the silence between numbers felt like someone listening. If you want to write a story, I said to myself, then the third migration is where the story begins. Lena Yarinkura, it says in the Migration Atlas, arrived at 52 metres. At 56 and 62 metres she endured thirst and hunger, yet she searched for her family group each day. Only at 70 metres did she achieve what must have been such a fantastic blessing: she finally found them. I could have shared this story; I could have told the rest of the migration. But it would have read like something else.
Lena Yarinkura was still two meters from the bottom of Centennial Bath, the deep-end, when she died. But first she weighed herself. Her profound and inadvertent insight: She could still wait. Whatever dramatic meaning she was living by, she could still apply it. Sure, there was no-one to exactly relate to, a Raba Kiley might do, or Topsy Emerton. But she could still wait for months. Just wait. Two meters away from the cave-in, she could still take months to let the pelvis shift, briefly and with acknowledgement, land-back onto the edge of a nest.
Not quite directly, Ellen van Neerven says: “Fuck being tragic and austere oh brown girls” (203). There is so much friction to work with. The camera might have been located in a nest like Lena Yarinkura's, at the end of the underwater migration. The fragile dark matter of the bottom of bodies might have been laminated with nesting for remembering all the ways we waited to die. There is a light and shadowed nest at 80 meters, situated at mile 169 of the book, towards the middle: our brother told us so. The nest with sculptural matter was contrasted with a more literal nest. It is the last poem in the book, and it is called “Dig.”
I guess Lena kept silent here, too. She might even have forgotten, at the end, that she was dying. The tilting foreshortening of centimeters was habitat, and objects such as Mars Bar and Mercury, uttered without regret, signalled the saltiness of extremities. There were so many things not be said as to things that were important. The disconnect between communicating desires and maintaining the deep end of selves. Right at the bottom of the story, she could begin adding years to the nesting mat, night after night. So if it wasn't the first migration, then the end of the third migration always finally, usually marks the end of the story. Surely some accurate reflection of this is why Topsy Emerton was finally tempted by her own blindness: it offered a window to her memories.
It ended with Moss. I wanted that somehow. The feel of the abundant form of, If not quite everything, then the promise. Moss like a leather upheaval. Moss like inherent eroticism. Imaginations, spark and wake. Stories that have their own snakes, locked to hide, waiting. The world's smallest bat under a leaf. Lifting up its face. That kind of Moss.
I am still in the middle, centre: between bones, between histories. There will be a traffic in between here and the migration. The docking of carriers. I recently found mechanical metaphors for thinking about the animals colonised by, or abruptly assimilated into, human bodies. The copepod is the definitive Daphnia inside someone else (170) (207). I am also the kind of animal that has novelty compromised bones that can be co- for and co- against, that makes room for biology to recombine. Pine tips◆ About the ending
❧ About the title