Showing posts with label sea. Show all posts
Showing posts with label sea. Show all posts
Wednesday, 8 October 2014
The rise to a lunar eclipse
There’s not much light here in the deep sea,
where we raise particles of dust
in spite of a lazy undulating motion;
mysterious translucent membranes
and our eerie luminescence.
Underwater vents warm us for a while
and are a fireplace in a desert’s night
where we find both food and society,
which go hand in hand,
and mouth on mouth.
It’s all calm, and night after night goes by
here in life’s deep end.
But we’ll end by looking up, we always do,
the intriguing sky from where carcasses fall:
an headless whale, the head of a dolphin,
and a tentacleless cuttlefish--
to what are its tentacles clinging?
Divine sashimi! An offer from the gods above!
And, upon close examination, only decay.
Bodies and our desires went upwards,
from black to deep blue, from green to azure,
gods ourselves for the first time,
investigating mirth and tragedies,
old acts in a new scenario.
What strange creatures, whales.
Upon interview they said to be cows who,
tired of false promises of sacredness,
returned to the sea: "Better a blowhole
than hold our breath for a blowjob."
Dolphins, no matter how cute,
were engaged in atrocities too, chasing,
hurling themselves against their infants,
or the ever dreamy porpoise, on purpose.
We're yet to meet bigger blowholes!
And cuttlefish? They're a Mafia.
Their short tentacles have an amazing reach,
as they use their ink to write and rule.
If pressed, they'll release a batch,
to hide with a stain what they're writing.
Foam distorted the image of trees on the shore,
waves made mountains seem to jerk,
as if inebriated by their own oxygen scarcity,
and so rocked we were in a daze
until night set in and calmed us down.
And thus floating we could have been found,
were it not for a Blood Moon that woke us up,
which we took for a symbol of what happens
when whales are hunted, dolphins adored,
and cuttlefish left alone to confuse us.
We sank back to the deep end, our gloom,
but under another moon we might emerge again.
_______
photo by John W. Johnson
Labels:
antonish,
blood moon,
cuttlefish,
dolphins,
lunar eclipse,
poetry,
sea,
whales
Tuesday, 19 August 2014
Laziness and Overpowering Forces
for Jennifer
I was on the beach where my father took us year after year, belly down on a towel, feeling the sand in between my fingers and toes, and the graininess of that sand stuck to parts of my body, a few grains on my scalp, a few more hiding in my eyebrows so that they could escape those barren grounds and come with me when I returned home; feeling the towel wet from my swimming trunks, the salty drops dripping from my body, feeling the towel hot from the sun; feeling the warmness of the penetrating sun on my back
[subliminal message: DON'T FORGET YOUR SUNSCREEN]
in contrast to those shivers the cold water I had just come out of provoked; feeling and hearing the breeze playing around my ears, feeling it caressing my left loin and my spine; hearing the distant sound of crashing waves invisible from where I was next to the lagoon; tasting the salt on my lips, those lips tasting my left arm, the youthful blonde hair on my arm tickling my lips; smelling algae and their iodine; my eyes semi closed so that I could see my eyelashes through which the sky blueness and the sand yellow came in into my brain as diffusely as bright. That was me being lazy--lazy yet more alive.
At that very same beach I went for a swim in the choppy North Atlantic, confident in my newly learned swimming skills even though I was still unable to float. There were other swimmers but all strangers to me. I dived and played under and over and through the waves, and when coldness finally defeated my thin layers of fat I tried to swim back to shore yet to no avail. The receding waters were dragging me back in. To the abyss--it felt that way. I shouted for help. No one seemed to have noticed. I swam again only to be defeated once more. I panicked a little--that little heart hard at work. And then. Then a true goddess, the one of Instinct, took control over me. I calmed down and waited for a favourable rush of water to swim back to the shore. And when the water receded each time, I let myself go; no resistance. After many repetitions, I felt the sand under my feet and walked the rest.
In the presence of overpowering forces, fight, flight, freeze? Or is it flow?
Fuck! What the hell do I know?
______
photo by Jorge Francisco Martins de Freitas
(Foz do Arelho, Portugal)
Labels:
antonish,
beach,
foz do arelho,
instinct,
laziness,
north atlantic,
sand,
sea,
waves
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