Underwater Bill Viola & Underwater with You
       

It depends on where the coined air comes between you, me, and

your cry, where tipped-white water falls to fall from your body

that looks like a crowned afternoon letting go of its memory of

you. Your child body slipped quiet beside death into a stilled lake

beneath its mountain surrounding, saw his new buried world rut,

beautiful there. All rain becomes sea, births a lake, becomes river,

now water, as if this water was liquid window opening out, out into

light that already broke from the gape-mouth of an orchid in another

country, moaned around the ankles of the one standing bedside beside

you in the willing dark as if to help your sleep-breathing live a little longer.

Invisible heavens will keep time climbing up inside your bones, water's

baritone move swooning the room. A father will never be brother, brother

never lover, lover not the mother a ship you climb back into to find green

brushstroke's horizon just past that sea's farthest tripwire end line where

the self-annihilating, far, all deflowering sun then somehow escapes daily.

Tweet
Copyright © 2019 Elena Karina Byrne All rights reserved
from Chattahoochee Review
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission