"Nothing waits below for you", mermaids smiled, and spoke to me.
Memory fled, then all I knew was written on the sea.
Great paragraphs, on ocean swells,
In running, sodden ink,
The bow broke foam from recollections,
My wedding day,
I think.
Words rose up the sides of waves,
and flung me down the other side.
Then licked the shore for crumbs they found,
That rose up in the tide.
Heartbeat slowed, my body sank,
Turned empty eyes beneath.
Rays of light revealed your face,
Colossal, in the reef.
The poet's memories are stripped away as his life is ending. Drowning at sea, his final sight is the staggering vision of beauty in a human face, seen formed out of the reef on the sea floor. Inspired by a dream and after a steady musical diet of nick cave's "push the sky away", including a track called "mermaids" which contains the haunting verse:
"I believe in the rapture, for I've seen your face,
on the floor of the ocean, at the bottom of the rays..."
Hear that noise recited by the author here:
https://soundcloud.com/warmphase/oceans-floor
