Reimagining Light

The water flows through hollow bones and returns / as a song. It sounds familiar in the beginning / Then always changes.

Reimagining Light

Every evening I am underwater:
bare and feathered. I’m never hungry.
I drag a chair to the bottom.
I nearly never pine for you down there.
The painful parts dilate and then are gone
as soon as I’m beneath, water long
overdue and holy, arriving as grace.
I read the sky at night before plunging. I look for
messages scratched into the moon from decades ago.
I understand the way the clouds reveal light & judgment,
reveal memory as the only truth, reveal waves
of overgrown desires. You can’t see them
from down here. There are blue horseshoe crabs
whose blood I refuse even after their tuned dance.
There are teeth on the floor I don’t recognize.
Sometimes I think of having you down here
when the music starts playing. Muffled, it arrives
from only certain caves that never see light.
The water flows through hollow bones and returns
as a song. It sounds familiar in the beginning
Then always changes. Anglerfish mouths remain
Open, small bulbs pulsating between their eyes.
My hair smells of copper; it grows wild behind me.
I sit cross-legged on the floor, praying the miners
never arrive, never make it this far. I stay the night.
In the morning, my arms raise for warmth,
my mouth opens & light comes out.