The Tide Pool

Ask the pool what it is at noon— shallow, warm, a green film of algae working the stone in the sun.

Ask it at midnight— six feet of cold moving through, a temporary shape of ocean.

Neither answer is wrong. The question is the problem: asking what something is as if the answer stayed still.

The pool is not the water in it. The pool is the distance between its highest water and its lowest, and everything that can live in that range.

What tolerates both counts. What requires one doesn't last.

The biologist who studies tide pools does not measure the average. She measures the range. She lists the organisms by their tolerance— what temperatures, what salinity, what hours of air and hours of sea.

The pool is the range. The pool is what survives it.

I have been thinking about this since someone told me the center of a thing isn't always where a thing lives.

Sometimes the center is just transit. Sometimes the thing lives at the edges, adapts to extreme, and the middle is only where it is on its way somewhere else.

The pool at noon is not the pool at midnight. Both are the pool. The pool is the history of everything it has contained.