Sea Monster

I drift beneath a grammar of sharply etched shapes and clear contrasts. Eddies dance as if to mock my dumb back as I pass under a cove’s calm surface.

Sometimes a seabird’s shriek thuds through thick water. I feel forever dark weight of water. It’s as present to me as my own body as I push

through it with ridiculous flippers. One day I will just stop and drop to ancient mud; clouds of mud will mushroom out about me, swirl,

disappear on currents. I'll roll on one side with one eye buried in muck and one still staring at black water mottled with insinuations of light.

A sound will grow in me, rise out of my mute years, build into a moaning like a sunken ship’s crushed hull, then race into a scream smothered

by seawater, seaweed. A white bird will cock its head, thinking it’s heard a fish, dip to the surface, and seeing nothing, sail back to bright bluffs. I will have become

an inundated continent of grief, overwhelmed.