Woman Watches Ocean on a Reef through a Glass-Bottomed Boat
In the ocean one fish
swallows the other:
a geometric progression of
loss.
You are bigger than I.
The calamity of love
swelling out larger than us.
And what destiny partakes of
our dilemma?
Swallows the cause and effect:
eyes and kissing mouths and enlarged
parts wanting to breathe and wanting.
There is no gentle sense to this.
Is there?
Only a kind of terror
at the chain
of events, the scale of loss, the ordered
destruction one against the other—
all that something larger
awaits its moment.
Copyright Credit: Angela Jackson, "Woman Watches Ocean on a Reef through a Glass-Bottomed Boat" from And All These Roads Be Luminous. Copyright © 1998 by Angela Jackson. Reprinted by permission of TriQuarterly Books.
Source: And All These Roads Be Luminous (TriQuarterly Books, 1998)