(melancholia)

III.

With a heave I unlace the delicate closure

And unbutton eyehooks quick as I can

So I can let out my stomach and draw in a fresh breath of

Mind to unlatch the ivory clasps

Throw open the heavy ceiling

Of my green-glassed red-wood wrought-iron chest.

An unfocused stare into its chasm

provokes images of calm waters,

soon agitated into a good-natured choppiness

by salty winds swelling from my throat.

And as I peer down,

My head becomes the moon to this private ocean,

And my breathing, now a pull; I brought the tide.

While my head hangs in the sky,

My hands grope to find the rim of known space,

the wooden lips of the world I'm leaving.

And for an eternity, I'm transfixed,

unintently,

In an utterly blank stare;

Eyes glued cemently to the surface of water.

Finally, Anyone speaks and breaks

eternity, like an egg,

on the side of a metal mixing bowl.

I am pulled from everything back into one thing, with a gravity;

My vision thaws, my skull resounds with the bowl's ring,

but I do not recover the tide quick enough to care

who or why or when what was said.

But my fingers feel the outside again,

my eyes drag across the water, now able to sip.

Drink

Its clarity.

I can see straight down to where it must be close to the bottom.

Eons away, but clearly visible―

its measure irrelevant.

Identifiable by lucid, lyrical blues.

The place is a rhythm steadier than my tide,

its cycle simpler than my moon's.

My feet twitch.

I peel off my socks and sweep my legs over the side,

making sure that a knee collides with one of the latches

to deliver a pang to the most echoic corners of my chest,

to send a metallic quiver through my walls

and the acoustic space between.