Along the lip
of its body’s bell
a fringe of calcium crystals
orients the jellyfish
to gravity. Held
in pockets,
the crystals graze nearby hairs
whose motion
neurons translate into up
or down.
In this, a jellyfish
steadies into its sea the way
a human ear
rights its body upon ground.
Having bred sixty-thousand jellyfish
in orbit around the Earth, in bags
of artificial sea,
NASA discovered in those medusae
later released into our oceans
difficult,
erratic pulses:
their down was
up, their
here
there.
In those cases when stones
in the labyrinth of a human ear
fail in their charge,
the vertigo it scripts into
the neurons’ plastic map
says no,
one is not right with the ground.
