Proserpina, Going Deeper
In shallow waters stolen coral fish eggs burst against my tongue like softest salty pomegranate seeds - no bitter core - and I will eat them all though I forget the taste of food in briny dimness. deeper, then. I shall see phosphorescent dance, lure and mating-flash; be seen in great unempty space by giant, unreflecting, architeuthic eye; learn, but not delight in, the collective noun for jellyfish in their stinging fluther. Touch me now, you alien angular dangle of salt-white spidering elbows: cephalopod blessing of Magnapinna white plume moth of the depths to carry memories away, and I will be so far away: oh, so very far and deep. so, deeper. mesopelagic bathypelagic where the light fades out abysso- hado- and I am come at last to the true Hades, science-named and -certified: the darkest place where the light never comes from the sun and I know I will die down here and I will be mourned somewhere up there on the unimaginable surface, land unthinkable dry where they remember words like rain and revival in sun or under clouds while I am become nothing: my sea-change into something whalebone-bare and unressurectable while I am become brother to the tubeworm and the blind red shrimp monastic sea-cowled brother to the great congregation of consumption wriggling hagfish blackly cleaning my sunken self down at last to bone: the undancing white bone that will not rise again when the sea gives up what gave itself to her.
October 20th, 2014