Submerged

recalling the death of my father

Into the gray-swayed depth of ocean,

current-stroked, settling slowly,

shimmer fading to the dull

and weighty darkness –

I traverse these layers,

thinking of my father;

Drawing me deeper down.

Sobs pearl past in strings like bubbles,

Grief venting madly, all oxygen-starved,

No regulator to manage this pressure

that is constant and capricious and tidal,

Nausea and knowledge sunk,

shrunk in a curved prism shimmer

Bobbing oblong like eggs,

And then, again: I am the witness

Sinking in my pale bathysphere,

Each image a creaking gauge of fathoms dropped.

I belly the sea-bed, overballasted –

Black iron rusts red-heavy in my gut

Every ingot is incised, relics of remembrance

Relating my amputations

In a concentrated catalogue of the removed.

The cherished driftwood-dead hours of ochre afternoons

Are piecemealed

Inexorably obscured. A particulate curtain,

Ebon grains of the hourglass coalesce,

Sifting veils drift with somber slowness across my sight.

Submerged, trapped fast in silt, I can but respire.