depth charge and surfacing
home has become like a submarine
and I know you’re waiting for an answer,
but I can’t stop obsessing over how
these four walls might be the only thing
between me and fifty fathoms
of crushing – you’ll tell me to breathe,
help me remember we’re not trapped
in an airlock, then we’ll talk and I’ll try my best
not to confuse you again with the woman
from the adverts channel selling Chanel
as I read your lips refracted through water,
hearing you in halves in the lull
of sea sounds, distracted by the idea
of whales breaching and leaving early
before sound slips slowly back from sonar
and I forget for a while about the bends,
underwater caves and surfacing. Then,
remembering how home has become like a submarine,
words will grow strangely oblong again
and we’ll share the dumb quality of anglerfish.
x
whale falls
He remembers how his brothers
were trawled out one after the other,
then left in the wrong waters to sink,
given for five months to the opportunists,
fifty years to the deep and then sand.
They followed their mother, beautiful
and blue, shortcutting to sediment and land
as she beached herself, her plastic lungs
heaving flesh that cried for the sea,
martyred and dazed. He cannot forget
how impossibly gentle grief and sleep can be,
folded around each other like sailcloth
after the magnitude of bursting
for he too will sink, slow
x
snow globes
The day after and none of it really matters –
packing peanuts are hysterical, boxing my sick
snoring cat could be a farce and I know
climate change is killing the river dolphin
and that the coral reefs are going grey,
but I’m watching milk separate and thinking
how lonely the little islands look, stirring
them slowly and getting distracted
by my power over all those flat-pack hurricanes,
waiting for someone to come home
and remind me that the clocks haven’t thrown it in
and that people aren’t just an idea I thought up,
an absurdity to amuse myself, bored
in my snow globe, finding the wrong things
hilarious. I’ve been laughing for half an hour
at the way the newsreader’s head bobs
like a cormorant – I can hear him talking
about an oil spill, the gulf stream and the contamination
of something, but I can’t shift myself
that far when the pigeons out of my window
have such a knack for parody and I haven’t seen
any other sign of life since nine o’clock
last Thursday, so I’m thinking maybe
it’s just me and them and the man on the TV
and that none of it really matters.