By Terry Trowbridge
The strength of eyelashes
ought to be measured
but how?
Their plasticity is almost infinite.
Whatever the pressure that bends them against their orbital bone,
they spring back in their orthogonal tangent.
Hair buried in a garden is forever fibrous:
inedible, over-wintering the beetle jaws,
mouse claws, sleet hammers, puddle-wide glacial rifts;
sometimes summering in bird architecture,
although we never identify our own hair
or a neighbour’s hair, in a nest’s wefts;
no matter how tightly we, at birth,
wrapped our baby fingers
around our aunt’s ponytail,
hairs are unrecognizable in the wind.
The same eyelash can be in thousands of nests.
Forever threads…but the memory is brittle.
Velocity is no object, nor pressure.
Shed one eyelash, it will not thud nor shatter.
At the bottom of the Mariana Trench
one thousand eighty-six atmospheres give no bends.
Benthic floors are made of billions of tiny eyelashes
Crisscrossed, reinforcing sands,
under crab hoofs and star spines,
the insulation for tube worms and their plasters.
Even lava might not break an eyelash,
the transformation from solid to plasma
happening too swiftly for cracks to form:
ashes assuming the place of snowflakes
on Vesuvian faces cast in stone.
Canadian researcher Terry Trowbridge’s poems have appeared in The New Quarterly, Carousel, subTerrain, paperplates, Dalhousie Review, untethered, Nashwaak Review, Orbis, Snakeskin Poetry, American Mathematical Monthly, M58, CV2, Brittle Star, Lascaux Review, Carmina, Progenitor, Muleskinner, Sulphur, Northridge Review, Ex-Puritan, Perceptions, Granfalloon, Literary Hatchet, Calliope, New Note, Confetti, Pennsylvania Literary Journal, and more. He is grateful to the Ontario Arts Council for grant funding during the polycrisis.