Through dark water

There was your death,

and then your second death,

the second an endless haunting:

its web of lies wrapped round me

until I drowned

under the weight

of revelation.

There were years

when I couldn't surface

from the ocean floor:

I lived amidst other wreckages.

My bones began dismantling

as surely as my life story.

My skin grew pale

as the white underbellies of fish

who avoided me

as if I exuded a poisoned elixir,

as perhaps I did.

Perhaps this contradictory grief

leaked from my pores

as toxic contagion.

Bubbles rose from my mouth,

and I supposed I had learned

to breathe under water --

how else could I still exist?

Or had I really drowned

and limbo was not a suspension

on the periphery of heaven or hell

but an attempted journey

to a distant beginning?

Thoughts rotated counterclockwise,

the backwards movement disorienting,

and although I sensed time passing,

I always arrived at the same place,

with the same wreakage about me,

the same fish exploring the same brokenness

on the same part of the ocean floor.

I don't know if I will surface again:

the need to see in this altered world

is more than I can bear.

But this is where I will stop,

half-way through the telling.

I have heard we believe what makes us happy.

I cannot yet decipher that claim.

For now, this water world embraces me

like an ancient womb,

allows the long gestation I need

to grow back into myself,

though the outcome remains uncertain.

But more frequently,

I hear a single thread of song

whisper through dark water.