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The Shape of Watera haibun by Melissa Allen

The new geometry mirrors a universe that is rough, not rounded, scabrous, not smooth. It

is a geometry of the pitted, pocked and broken up, the twisted, tangled and intertwined.

[S]uch odd shapes carry meaning. They are often the keys to the essence of a thing.

James Gleick, Chaos

Full fathom five thy father lies,

Of his bones are coral made,Those are pearls that were his eyes.

Nothing of him that doth fade,But doth suffer a sea change

Into something rich and strange.

Shakespeare, The Tempest

We saythings are shapeless when they have a shape we dont like, that is to say an

irregular shape, a lack of symmetry, a pointlessness, a want of recognizable organizingprinciple, an unanalyzable form, an outline that fails to substantially map to any other

outline weve ever seen, an unfamiliarity, a strangeness, a monstrosity. We are afraid theshapeless thing will take us over, erase our edges, unbalance us, take away our sense of

purpose. We are afraid we will be eaten.

youre water step into the water

A womanis often referred to as shapeless, especially after she has borne children. Sheis no longer a tidy package, she has been stretched, distorted, colonized; she leaks, her

boundaries are not clear. Her infant seems at times like a removable appendage, a strangegrowth on the body that appears and disappears, both unpredictable and grotesque. Her

flesh ebbs and flows, like the sea, to accommodate the childs appetite.

in a shadow in the pond eggs being laid

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The sea, too, strikes us as shapeless, vast and mutable, mutating, mute. Its edges areuntraceable and its depths unknowable, and it contains an uncountable number of other

forms. Many of these we also call shapeless, because we cant clearly perceive or definetheir shape. Sponges, coral, jellyfish: we say they are lumpy, blobby, bumpywords

sound like mumbling; inarticulate and undefined speech. The sea silences us and imposes

its will on us, and sometimes, in fact, it does eat us, and if we are ever seen again we areunrecognizable.

in the aquarium all the things we used to be

There, on the shore, amid the wrack and ruin, the flotsam and jetsam: thats you, ashape I can recognize and name, if not fully comprehend. You were once part of my body

but now youre part of the air. Youre moving from shell to shell, from driftwood todriftwood, touching, lifting, examining, choosing, collecting. Like everyone else, you

toss aside far more than you collect. Every once in a while you look back inland, everyonce in a while you look out to sea. The sun is setting and your figure is melding with the

darkness; Im watching you and then Im failing to watch. What happens to you at last? Itry to draw my suspicions in the sand, but the sea rises up and reproaches me.

ocean vents the life we dont remember