Biosphere
May 20 2008


You feel it, 10,000 feet up
— the thin air,
the cool astringent weather,
a little short of breath.
Just a couple miles
20 minutes at an easy walk,
and the air that blankets the planet
is already getting threadbare,
close to bumping your head
against the cold black shell
of outer space.
So we huddle down here
on the warm green surface,
looking-up at blue skies
and cotton-batten clouds.
The ocean of air, it turns out
is a perilously thin slice.

I’d feel so much safer
underneath a real ocean,
all the way down to its floor
— the stillness,
the temperature constant,
the crushing weight
of water.
Where it’s totally dark
and the only sound, my heartbeat.
And though I’m washed back and forth with the tide,
and my naked body
swept along by vast invisible currents,
there is no sensation of motion, down here.
I am one with the ocean,
all my boundaries dissolved.