Addressed to the Being of the Dark Beneath

Rise I call you into glowing motion

Devious dweller in pressure

Cold current of truth

You are found where you were not looked-for

Cambodian salmon carp we call you

Though you are no one named

Improper presence, please rise

Swimming with Chinese youth

Thousands gently smiling along lamp-lit highways

Surging toward the famed soup of Kaifeng

Ordinary snail of prehistory without a shell

Hermaphrodite bioluminescent deaf one in love

Divine self-subsistence is also a curse

I call you I need you in the slipstream with me

For I too often imagine in error:

Seeing no one & nothing but dark

Feeling only the cold current

Willow catkin clouds sporadic lilt & dangle

Its aspirin music tends to tear the morning

Into pink devastating halves:

The one just goes fleeing for its life

Because it can so I follow you in

To the sea of images drawn from wet net

How long, you ask, & I say

Try to see

Tonight we become smelt of the moon

Globes of circling silver inked pupils

You float upward, parched white coral face

Flooding to & fro

Someone—you?—knows how to sing this ocean

As a prayerful cataclysm

I pause in mid-breath on the fish ladder

Are we not holy?

For I am dark as you until winter

In fading pink given over to the other

The break was not a kindness

But a still space

You, Being, know me as caesura as I know you

You, Dark Presence, as out-breath, empty

Give it over to me once more

I vow to ease it swift return