Paramecium

Terry Trowbridge

My living water, here she is, split, all, on the earth! She slips

and runs away from me; I thirst and run after her.

-Marc di Saverio (2013). Sanitorium Songs, p. 47.

​

Slipper and Cinderella at once,

she is cilia-covered celerity streaking

through the inchoate microcosms,

strong enough to sweep aside distractions

and disregard currents.

​

She is iconoclastic.

She mouths an oblique groove.

She contrasts buccal sliver

against bucolic slimes.

​

She is the speeding reproduction.

She is Xeno’s paradox in mitosis form.

Racing mitosis separates, half-selves

make journeys, then bisect, then diverge.

She is intentional Xerox.

She is plenitude of motions and symmetries.

The uncountable because she is the uncatchable.

When grabbed by a predator, how many of her are eaten?

Count the number of the stars, then subtract her.

That is how many of her remain: the infinity

of infinity-minus-nth.

​

Even at the moment you see only one,

all that she indicates is that there is another,

somewhere, because from herself she made a pair.

Princess party:

bibbity bobbity boo:

self-symmetrical shoe.

Terry is a researcher and farmer whose poems and literary criticisms are published in a plethora of publications such as the Pennsylvania Literary Journal, Carousel, Humanistic Mathematics, British Columbia Review, Erato, and more. Gratefully funded by his first writing grant from the Ontario Arts Council, this poem is part of a series inspired by the visionary poet Emile Nelligan, translated by Marc di Saverio.