I wake up in my wetsuit as the dark wakes up in its cold— some things are like this, as unavoidable as a body swept across a brain.
I start early and hungry, all my cells feeling new and round but crushed: the shapes a church bell makes when it halves the air.
the pond sits in the morning like an ache pooling across an old joint, a leg unbends, the water throws one sore and jagged gleam up the hill side.
I follow the path of glow down to where it throbs, the leaf-patched shoreline gone blue like snow in a long evening or veins trailing home.
it’s steep, the oxygen tank is heavy with metal and wind pressed on itself like a dried flower compacted to paper. I tap the tank it rings its dull voice, full of pages where my breath will write me down.
I step in and secure the mask to my mouth, the light kiss of other air bleeds in and I walk until the ground is gone and the water asks for my body to melt into strokes; a church bell.
the middle is not far and I get there, cold and like the light: tracing the air for home. the below is dark. the above only has its one moon.
the dive involves going headfirst, breathing. the black is around me like an eyelid closing, I turn on a flashlight, scrape the dreamed landscape for an iris and pupil.
I rove and slip and feel my skin starting to become the same cold as the cold. I hug my name into my ribs and try to keep my body inside sensation.
and then I catch it, the white gathered haze of my flashlight wakes up across the desk chair which, last week, you sunk to the bottom with rocks tied to its legs. you’ve always been like that— lovely, impossible, inexplicable— I sit and read the morning’s paper as it flowers out to snow inside the numb water; my body does the same.
- c.essington