Mondays tend to offer numerous reminders of the need for an underwater excursion. With this in mind, today’s found poem is an assembly of phrases found in Jacques Cousteau’s introduction to The Ocean World, a stunning volume that featured prominently in my childhood imagination.
The act of life,
an eye permanently open––
immense, teeming; plankton like haze,
barely visible, monotonous. Now what?
The diving years reveal a thin layer
of sea, fragile––at our mercy, somehow,
this organized crystal of three-dimensional
nothingness: ocean intelligence buried
under waste. Consider the precariousness
of this third infinity, in the grabbing hands
of someone unable to think beyond what he
might take: salvation, discovery, the next ride.
Even the next image, and yet, listen at
the edges: what third infinity continues
in constant chorus, inaudible to those
above, still held by laws of degradation
before the threshold of this ancient beyond?
