Metamorphosis

Come, love: dive with me
into the well of silence. Eel-like,
entwined, we’ll seek the dark.
Pioneers of lightless new metropoli
eyeless, finned and sinous,
we’ll know the ocean’s currents within and without
with new senses, neither taste nor touch.

Already the transformation begins:
people go by in groups
stop and turn as one—
wet raincoats flashing in the light—
slip past and vanish.
Trees toss in slow-motion
while unseen surf thunders overhead.
At the corner a ragged man
with the mad blind stare of an ancient sturgeon
mutters: “Watch for sharks.”

We were ever drifters. Call me jetsam.
Call me homeless, plankton, glass-shelled diatom,
larval oyster, alien, sargasso eel, transient,
microscopic citizen of a different kingdom.
Monstrous adulthood approaches:
time to colonize, set down some byssae
or learn to swim.