Deep Sea Diver​​

​

There’s a field inside my head

 

It’s dark and flat and a moon hangs 

above it in whose silvery light 

nothing appears to live

 

It’s very mysterious and simple,

on a different planet    

 

to this one here      

that moves and is manifold:

 

each one of the tens of millions of blades of grass

shivers in its singularity;

 

one sheep’s crusty underwool is home

to a greenbottle settling down to lay

her two hundred and fifty possibilities

 

while another stares out 

of the glazed globe of an eye

 

not unlike a man who’s lost his mind

but found there cause instead

to be vaguely, dully, afraid of everything

 

And beneath the sheep

and field and flattened buttercups,

miles and miles beneath

 

all is shift and shale,

burn and boil

 

Old underearth,

unseeable, unexplorable;

 

who scrambles through your soft weak rock,

who swims through your molten ocean,

what holds court at the centre

of your solid iron ball the size of the moon?

​

Once I plumbed down 

level by level 

 

into the sea,

into the realm 

 

of the falling debris,

dead and dying-fish-eating creatures

 

into the freezing black waters 

of blind long-tentacled things;

 

down among the deepwater canyons I went

and still nowhere near was I

 

to the outer core

of the earth’s interior,

its massive indoors

 

when I saw hanging there

a sole, or flounder

 

a self never before seen 

 

but one who remained unchanged 

in the bright beam of my look

 

And I rose to the surface

like one who had only that to do

 

where slowly over the years

all that I held dear came loose

 

and I took to the fields

that covered the earth

like so many soft dressings

 

and I lay down and looked up at the sky

 

where I saw a fish hanging 

in the black, where I saw a moon