April Poetry | First Passage from a Work in Progress (to be called The Dive Coast)

First Passage from a Work in Progress (to be called The Dive Coast)

— Jim McKeon —

I dive because I love it How can I put it else?
When diving, one enters the kingdom,
a ceremony of retinal dream scrolling across a vast screen,
a sky of self forgetfulness: The guard smiles
and leaves the cell door open wide.

A boat, drifting, starts a slow dance against the intermittent drag of chain.
I sit on the gunnel, a hand pressing mask and regulator firmly against my face, and drop backwards into the living water.
A blue world of enchantment looms.

I descend slowly along the anchor chain, schools
of Yellowtail and small Zebrafish rising to meet me. I am absolutely alone
in a garden of innocence, drifting upside down across the face of the reef, my mask hovering over the carpeted surface, rising and falling without conscious intent.

It seems as though reef gazes entranced on reef, an unhurried all-seeing eye taking in myriad fish, scrolled emblem and brushed enigma, iridescent colors as precise as the gliding accelerations they embody: a sweep of pink-rimmed orange dividing deep jet in such arbitrary fashion that in a schooling turn no single individual stands out or betrays its orientation,
so vivid the camouflaging chromes.

Quicksilver schooling: the rhythm of this moving
seems, by turns, quick and nimble: sudden explosion
as of gun startled quail, a candle quenched by gusting wind,
a flame flickering back to life again, then hypnotic,
slow and stately, the languid falling of a woman’s arm.

Now, in retrospect these many years later, it occurs to me
that I had seen something like before, a mist of birds upon the wing,
mere weeks ago upcountry, the darting dissolving dance of red-billed quelea in great coherent flocks, all of one mind…