Bathypelagic

Kadalinte aghadhathayil ninnu orirutt ooliyitt vannu enne pothinju—Muhsina K Ismail

A spherule of darkness swims up from sea-depths and wraps around me/

We alternate trapping each other/

To have dragnets launched from my sea-vessel and held down by lead weights and buoyed up by gourd floats/                 is weaving years of yearning with spruce root fibres and wild grass needles into a smooth knitting of love I can line-fold and carry in my hands into invaginations of your bay/

To be a fisherman and knot bellies of windchimes into a singular emotion/         is a kind of genetic endowment/     

I am an aggregate of all the piered cloudforms I have taken time to absorb at your sea-washed window/

To have gathered the strength to wait through your saturated currents and the grit of your love patiently/                    means crab-shells, plumeria, opened box of diwali sweets on my table on different times of the year begging to be cross-linked to a coherent narrative by picking up hidden cues in every object you leave with me/

Me as in all my past selves—sternum-and-scapulae, millstone-and-mustard, the wistful-and-vengeful— mouse into cracks of the sky reflected onto my ship-deck as I grow desperate for help with my spooling gear and the warping head of the winch. I am deckhand and commodore when your wavelets draw my waterline/

Laid out flax nets amounts to hope of a haul-in, the prospect of trapping your shoal of colours, myriad ways in which you inhale my soul, many ways you move through it/

I am a by-catch of our love eclipsed by the countless ways sky intervenes/ 

A drop of your darkness swims up from your depths and traps my skin/

Carry me there then/

beyond the glisten of your lens instead of may-be-glimpses, likely-reflections:

your fish, mostly water:

bristle-mouthed and dagger-teethed, dripping bones and phosphors/

If you inhere in hinged jaws, and scale-less elongations, if you inhabit recurves and define lightlessness by a drawstring-shut reservoir of bottomless light-ness, that’s where I want to be/

I will teach you how to ret and weave flax, wait for the tide-dip, walk/

Let’s ford sea-glass and surfaces with what we have stashed in our 8000 years of deepening drunkenness/