Dolphins

 

Everything is so far away. I cannot even reach
my fingertips. Somewhere inside me, my real hands
dangle at the elbow, my little feet stumble
on enormous unfamiliar knees.
This kind of sea makes me cold to look at.
It swallows up reflections of the fire,
freezes flame into indifferent blue.

 

It is time again:
time to go searching for the dolphins.

 

I row out in a walnut shell. That, too,
is huge. I am an atom rolling in its cavity.
There are fibers here big as my arm.
Beyond all land: overboard the oars: scuttle.
Nothing now but the deadness of the sea.
I yield to the deadness that is me,
and trust the dolphins.

 

A drowning man has time to think.
I look around at a world of debris,
crusted hopes. Fat fish wallow
in seaweed; stare. They can't fool me this time:
I know myself in that form, too. Tentacles
writhing, grasping, sucking:
that, too, I acknowledge, and relinquish.
Sharks tear at me. Mouths zero in.
I only wait. Teeth snap
right through me. Nothing but an empty mouth,
a toy mouth, painted eyes.
They don't fool me either, any more,
with threatening a dead man.
Their trick is
to kill me and refuse to let me die.
All but the dolphins.

 

Forbidden treasure glows.
Sunken volcanoes of stolen gold.
Ah!
I can sense it: the dolphin is behind me.
Or will it be fangs again in my spine?
Only one way to know.
Whatever in this sea is me, will come.
And welcome.

Only I hope for the dolphins.

Only I hope for the dolphins,
and I am astride a dancing eye,
a blue snout cracks in a crooked grin,
and we drop like a stone through the sea.
Arches spring out over emptiness.
We hurl through depressions deep in the bone,
and play, and rouse, and shatter surfaces
till old backwaters of the blood boil up
with the splash of laughter. My hands are everywhere.
I touch the sky. I touch the fire.
I open a chest burning on the bottom.
I breathe. Ah, finally, I drown:
and I am the gold, I am the fire,
I am the dolphin, and the sea is -- me!

--Gerald Grow

 

Searching for the Dolphins

 

There are no easy ways to drown.
Sometimes in all the oceans
there's just one hole to go through
to the dolphins--a pin-hole
in a wall of water. No map shows it.

 

I have a bubble will not burst,
old grief, a tension-field
electrified with fear.

 

How can I call you?
What name, what language,
can command the sea?
How can I forget enough
to once remember where you are?

 

Is it so easy?
To sink and--dolphins?

 

Something's wrong.
They come but do not come.
They're here but not here.

 

I reach for the laughing eyes and crooked grin,
I reach for the power that flashes by,
I grab, scream, beg--whimper--
but nothing interrupts the dolphins' play.
They swim a circle of unbroken joy,
round and round on their serene sleek tails.

 

I cry out for those who do not need me.
The hot salt sea
bursts through my bubble
and I drown alone into sleep--
while they play on,
indifferent as disease,
and hurt and humble me
to heal.

--Gerald Grow

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