Gyotaku

 

 

In the belly of the whale, in mine,
a sensation of hollow immensity.
No dead fish there. I haven't eaten favored fruits from the ocean floor.
The dry colorations of coral are all I've digested.
Bitter fruit, meal of bone, cartilage trailing wounds.
I move without depth, in vertigo
I breathe, it's agitated or deliberate, always artificial,
waiting for a pale hand to run down my silver spine.
If a wave would rock me back against the reef! So
will I come to death. I will be flayed and divided,
as any other flesh, among the people.
I remember watching over the horizon and waking
to the chant of algae. Something I thought I saw in relief and moving
through that immensity, my home on the seafloor.
Now dragged by knowledge of my thick body
tangled in a miserable profundity
at whose disposal will I be?
I don't want to nurture the strange consolation
of a final harpooning by a scavenger.
I'd rather pretend to have remained absent from the profound depths.
Astonished and constant among the minor fish.

 

 

 

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