Night Dive

By Samuel Green

 

Down here, no light but what we carry with us.   

Everywhere we point our hands we scrawl   

color: bulging eyes, spines, teeth or clinging tentacles.   

At negative buoyancy, when heavy hands   

seem to grasp & pull us down, we let them,   

we don’t inflate our vests, but let the scrubbed cheeks   

of rocks slide past in amniotic calm.   

At sixty feet we douse our lights, cemented   

by the weight of the dark, of water, the grip   

of the sea’s absolute silence.  Our groping   

hands brush the open mouths of anemones,   

which shower us in particles of phosphor   

radiant as halos.  As in meditation,   

or in deepest prayer,   

there is no knowing what we will see.

Green, S. (1998). The Grace of Necessity, Cistercian Studies Quarterly, 33(1). Pittsburgh, PA: Carnegie Mellon University Press.
Photo Credit: Dan Delong, Seattle P-I.