Bottom Dweller
You are a bottom dweller of the deepest kind,
hidden away behind dark glass, scales and eyes,
where the air hugs your skin in balmy gloom.
This is black Atlantis in a basement room:
flickering jeweled bodies under secret light and
your love swimming with them amid hollow castles
and breaths of air that rise to the surface as pearls.
And I am no fisherman, but you are the trophy-fish of lore,
the dream that ancient Ahab could not stop searching for,
ghostly beautiful but battle-scarred, slipping slow
between veins of algae and mud-slicked stones.
Living somewhere between deep silence and earth,
because those are the biggest parts of you.
What else is there?
Oh, if you would surface, I would show you the sun
so it would peel away your slimed olive skin,
and you would breathe the air again.
And somewhere there would be what is real,
the father I know you used to be,
who held a little girl’s hand because she was afraid
to follow you into that monstrous myth, the silent sea.
The Junk Drawer 