The Poetry Society

 

Where you came from is one thing, but where are you going?

You can't stay here by the chimney. It's time to leave.

Float up with the smoke through the water column.

Perhaps there are larvae floating with you,

 

glass slivers primed to look for the heat

of the next vent so that the shrimp

don't die out when their fire does.

 

They'll only come so far.

You seek your own fire,

 

the yellow one.

 

*

 

You go from down to up, decompressing all the time

with a splutter as your sea-breath goes out of you,

startling an oarfish, a red-maned sea-serpent

that loops round opening its toothless mouth.

 

The sea's still too dark, indigo with

the wrong gleam in its many eyes.

Plankton are upwelling too,

 

a snowfall in reverse

towards the snowlight

 

of the surface.

 

*

 

You come up in the magnesium of a full moon,

getting your sunlight secondhand for the moment.

You must have been walking all day in the dark.

Now that your head is out of the water

 

you realize how far from home you are -

the moon could be the nearest land.

Where wind and sea meet, you feel

 

cold in two ways at once.

But keep on treading.

 

The boat will come.

 

*

 

The surface of the ocean. It's too deep here for waves.

There is only the slight swell that turns into them

thousands of miles away. A bubble rises,

which you'd never notice, except this time

 

you're closer to it than you might be

and have been to where it came from.

Now it's dispersed in the air -

 

another ocean, or

part of the same one,

 

the deep blue world.