The Poetry Society

Now at last you've reached the flat lands, the abyssal plain

where sea cucumbers have scrawled their tracks on the floor

for you to read. No current wipes them away.

Whatever lives here has the steadiness

 

of lowlanders; they scrape out burrows,

live on the leavings of above,

make their own entertainment.

 

As you pass through their fields,

they chat about you

 

in blue morse code.

 

*

 

News from the surface. It has been spring there recently

and the plankton has flowered, a drifting forest.

Specks of animals sheltered and browsed in it,

left their droppings, and died when the plants died,

 

and the whole tangle of tissue sank.

Now the lowlanders have their turn,

a hand-me-down flowering

 

that fills the hollows with

edible, green-brown,

 

flocculent gunge.

 

*

 

This was a sperm whale that swam with outriding dolphins,

that hung from the swell to sleep, disturbed the ocean

as it plunged into the darkness to hunt squid.

It is deeper than ever now, opened

 

and stinking, the squid's parroty beaks

spilled out on the floor. The red shrimp

and rat-tail fish tear the white

 

from its last rags of blue.

It will be gone soon,

 

a weight lifted.

 

*

 

Just when you thought you had no enemies here, something

stabs your foot. You think of seasnakes and weever fish -

what venoms have been waiting under the sludge

to kill their first ever human? You stoop

 

and pull out a tapered length of rust

The tab on the end shows a ship.

It reads: SS Madeira.

 

Once on the sun-deck this

held the cherry in

 

a manhattan.