Day Twelve

Title: and I will show you the beauty of drowning

Sometimes, I love the darkness I walk in. Sometimes too much. I am slippery, uneven. I sink, and I love the sinking. The way the surface looks from below. I become transfixed.

Years ago, my brother was on a ship off the coast of Africa when he told me the story of the Cape of Good Hope. It is almost the southernmost tip of Africa, the place where the Indian and the Atlantic Oceans meet. The current there are wild. Wild in a way that breaks boats. He said the troughs between waves become unusually wide so that when boats sail through, their hulls often split because long lengths of the boat go unsupported with the wide troughs.

I thought about that Cape and about my own seas. About the graveyard of ships below my surface.

I wanted to look poetically at that capacity that I have, especially in relationships, to sink ships, and to marvel at the view from the bottom of the sea.

***

for the light of the surface

tell me you won’t mind
carrying this weight with me
a boat full of sand
carrying the weight of me

the ocean has its own density
and I have mine
and some boats never make it
around the Cape of Good Hope

they will not float where the currents
of the Indian and the Atlantic oceans meet
it has to do with wave lengths
and boat lengths
troughs and peaks

and boats are heavy things
even without sand in them

tell me you won’t mind
the fickle currents
or a ship-wrecked kind of sinking
from time to time

and I will show you
the beauty of drowning
and rising again for the
light of the surface
and not for the air