13 Feb What I Found at the Bottom of the Sea
At the end of the earth
Where God had sunk the sea
I could see every wave fall
Until they fell over me
In calm, capsized squall
Past the breakers set free
For years I wandered
For years the desert underneath
Skies shimmering, swaying
Of waters bound for the beach
A shadow of waters staying
Far that I might not breathe
The surface moves
With webs of light afar
Stolen from a painted night
Over where the sunken are
That dance to surge delight
Its threshed-silt reservoir
I followed the surge
Benthic breezes blown
Like it were the Gulf Stream
Leading toward some unknown
Treasure I could never dream
Hidden in sand, all alone
What had I searched for
The bones of old airplanes
Like fallen angels swept
In the green of ocean veins
That sands forever kept
In dysphotic seafloor plains
Had I longed to find
A boiling volcanic vent
Serving as habitation
For a beast of the descent
On the edge of all creation
The last of all intent
Why walk the deep-dark
But to find a spectacle
A wooden chest to unlock
In a galleon’s ventricle
Some formation of rock
Or a place lost, sepulchral
Perhaps the face of God
Beyond the firmament’s keep
Or some relic He left for me
Waiting in the solemn deep
Where the fissures of the sea
Groan in primordial sleep
They say that the ocean
Will always be a mystery
But there is no Davy Jones
No ghosts nor gods of the sea
Merely academic unknowns
Stripped of all their majesty
Even the lowest abyss
Even black oblivion
Even the pelagic gallows
For mountains of a lost eon
Feel like coastal shallows
Prolific, primeval, protean
Its hollow echoes
Strike my bones and ring
From thunders of a cannon
From some undersea thing
Longing for a companion
For whom it might sing
This, the mightiest
In all the seven seas
Glaciers calving far away
Roar as they conceive
And hiss and cry and bray
As their children go to leave
This is the dirge
Ever a funeral song
The orchestra of the seas
And its cold waters play along
So cold, it should all freeze
But everything down here is wrong
The seas are so vast
Seven stitched together of old
By now it should be full
But the water is so cold
You can feel the land pull
Life toward the tide-fold
The ocean so seems
A lonely, empty place
Where the one grand felicity
To see another face
Past a curtain of turbidity
Churns in a halfway-space
In this Platonic fold
The tassels of reality
The glimmering uncertain
Could find its way to me
Currents carry through the curtain
At the bottom of the sea
For those like me
Under twenty tons of water
Too deep to fathom
Who would even bother
What shore will have them
A sea-seized son or daughter
I survive quiet
Though dashed upon the reef
I said in littoral tongues
I had no air to breathe
The halocline fills my lungs
And moves behind my teeth
To be underwater
Well, how can I relate
Where troubles form the blue
The bars accumulate
Until the whelm overtakes you
Then it becomes too late
Under the climb
Of the last thermocline
The water is pitch and cold
Up the segments of my spine
Down the firmament fold
Where you were, were always mine
You were all alone
Drowned, but alive
Behind your salt-blind eyes
Where nothing dared to dive
You sobbed breathless, soundless cries
Living depths none could survive
Beyond the pillars of earth
Where God had sunk the sea
Until the tides are brought together
Into the peace of all-glory be
In the whelm of calm forever
Past the breakers set free
The ocean stretches the horizon
And will long after we are gone
But somewhere in the vast array
Something waits for me today
Seas are cold yet I search for you
I know the depths of the ocean, too
I have terrors at night, memories
Of the heavy gloom of deaf seas
I will not breathe in water anymore
Pound the shallows till we wash ashore
Arising where wave-rivets roll
A kiss tastes like water, like soul
Flooding my spirit, a heart’s intrigue
Down below, what is out of my league
When will the tide bring you to me
I need you like a breath under the sea