The Poetry Society

This is the road from the shelf to the abyssal plain.

Its name is mud. So let's see how low we can get,

exploring the local night-life. This red crab

rearing up at you with his pincers splayed

 

thinks you're invading his territory,

the city of mounds and burrows

where crabs hang out, on the edge.

 

Don't stir up sediment.

Just sidle past him

 

down the soft slope.

 

*

 

You cross a knee-high forest of feathers, the sea-pens

filtering granules of food from the slow currents

that push through the dark. They finger you as if

regretting you're too big for them to eat.

 

You pass the sponge-fields where hairy pots

the size of grapefruit are half-sunk

in the mud, breathing through holes

 

 

in their tops, a trove no

archaeologist

 

will excavate.

 

*

 

Where you come from a cucumber is a vegetable

that tastes of green pondwater. But the ones here have

a will of their own. This one's a spiky tube

flexing itself on its nipples of legs;

 

another's its own magic carpet,

a living shoe-sole that billows

over the sea-floor, lightly

 

as if its tons of sky

were not pressing it,

 

grazing the ooze.

 

*

How long has it been snowing? You've only just noticed

the scatter of flakes falling round you, but you know

that's it's gone on and will go on forever

and that it always settles. You catch one.

 

It isn't any colder than you

in your miles-deep chill. It won't melt

after its fall through the wet.

 

It's a piece of something

that was once alive,

 

a being flake.