INTO THE LAKE
The sun skips like a flat stone
Across the unruffled water.
I enter with one exaggerated stride
through the skin of the lake,
down across layers of increasing gray
towards the center of the earth.
My body is tunnelling through,
propelled by oversized web feet;
the water filling quickly behind me
and taking the shape of my body.
Over the bones of wreckage,
Those wooden ribs eluted of air
by the cold water, forsaking rot, I am the alien here,
gangling and strange, lungs filled
with the bottled air strapped to my back.
In the ebb of the lake, I float in neutral buoyancy
between the wooden ribs and over the keel,
pausing where the captain would have stood
at the helm, defiant against the wind and rain
and the black-whiplashing waves.
A startled perch in perfect balance disappears
into the darker gray nearer the bottom.
The weighted belt drops as I try to cinch
it tighter, and I am in a sudden, maddening,
race with my expelled bubbles to the surface.
On my back, displaced in water, as the ever
intensifying light rushes to smack my forehead;
desperate that my lungs won’t burst like the
coalescing bubbles around me.
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Featured image credits to 爪丨丂ㄒ乇尺_卩丨ㄒㄒ丨几Ꮆ乇尺 on Pixabay
