The ocean casts its darkness
like a man, inward:
to ascend its midnight
inside a steel bubble drifting
up toward matter’s core, sea-crush
curling around you like the killing
curiosity of a child, is not to climb
the black no-thing space is,
but a black all-thing, an everything
of turbid substance so molasses
even its quiet adds weight.
How furtively past your porthole
dart this nightscape’s burghers!
Cretaceous-finned fishes trawl thready,
luminous, inessential appendages,
beards evolution’s barterings
could muster little exchange for.
Outside your radium beam dim shoals
incandesce, divulging irises
of impounded rainbow, nurturing
ancestral, vestigial sunlight
under drab, conforming scales!
To emerge from wave-broth at terrene
intelligence’s shore of air and claim
we must await the planets,
our heel’s intaglio,
to verify our flesh as faith
affirms the soul is to deny
what looms so clear below. There, too,
existences of meager fortune
in the crushed-foil-glittery aluminum surface
ventured, discovered a lack can thrive
and nestled down to stay.