Dave Bonta's "Siphonophore" begins as a scene of discovery and ends as a quiet joke at our expense. A remotely operated vehicle descends three thousand feet and "probes / the ocean like an endoscope", a comparison that makes the sea a body and the machine a doctor's instrument. Then something appears on the monitor, and the poem's mood changes. The creature arrives as "a sudden carnival float", a phrase that is funny, a little gaudy, and exactly right for something drifting out of the dark in pieces of colour. Its name comes twice, first with an exclamation mark and then as a flat fragment, as if the scientists, and the poem, need a moment to catch up with what they are seeing.
The poem's central idea is that this animal puts the human idea of selfhood in doubt. A siphonophore is a "corporate being whose members are truly members", and the pun does a lot of work. "Corporate" means both "of a body" and "like a company", while "members" are both limbs and participants. The animal is a colony of "co-dependent, specialized" parts that functions as one creature. The poem's best line may be its description of the siphonophore as "free of all / hard parts, including that nugget / the self." Calling the self a "nugget" makes it something small, solid and slightly greedy, and the line break after "nugget" isolates it. The siphonophore has no such centre, and it still moves with a grace the poem calls "a music."
The imagery pulls between two worlds, the sea and the sky. The scientists are "open-mouthed / as shepherds at the hush of wings", which, I think, recalls the shepherds of the Nativity story and gives the sighting a hint of revelation. Yet the wings are "not grown for any air we know." Later the animal is "weightless & translucent as / the dreams of birds", and when it breaks apart it "fl[ies] to pieces." The creature is described as flying, and the sea becomes a sky. The ampersand in "weightless & translucent" has a similar lightness, since it takes up less room on the line than "and" would.
Beauty and the body keep meeting each other. The transparent tissue is "clear gelatinous", but through it winds "the digestive apparatus," "lurid as a sunrise." The phrase turns something as unglamorous as a gut into a dawn. The list of facts, such as 130 feet in length and a glow of "blue or green when disturbed", reads like a field report. Then comes a quieter detail: some are so delicate that "a cone of light alone can shatter them." The scientists' own light destroys what it reveals, and the line gently questions the wonder the poem has just built.
Formally the poem is free verse with no rhyme and no stanza breaks, a single column of text that suits a descent through water. The lines are short and uneven, and the sentences run across them, so the reader keeps sliding downward. Fragments ("Siphonophore." "All are predators.") break up the longer, flowing sentences and work like surfacings or stings. The poem's two big questions are tentative. Is life "a conversation / matter is having with itself"? Is cooperation "at the highest level / indistinguishable from genius"? Both are phrased in the manner of speculation, and neither is answered.
The answer, if there is one, is the ending. After the grand questions, the poem says flatly, "All are predators." The final sentence stretches over several lines and holds its sting for the very end. The animals lure prey, "those / so foolish as to possess central / nervous systems", into "poisonous harpoons." The joke turns on us. The creatures with brains and selves, the ones who build submersibles and feel awe, are the foolish ones, and the self just dismissed as a nugget is what gets caught. The poem does not scold us for this. It leaves us delighted and slightly humbled, which is a hard balance to strike.
This makes "Siphonophore" a useful poem to study. It shows that scientific facts can carry real feeling when the poet chooses words precisely, and it shows how a short poem can move from wonder to wit to unease without changing its tone. By the last line the scientists' open-mouthed stare has taken on a second meaning, because open mouths are exactly what prey display.