There is an ocean inside you.
I can hear it between your words
as clearly as the yawning roar
from the pearly slit of the seashell at my ear.

You have held these tides at bay
and have quelled the undulation of the waves
with the steady power of your gaze,
but the fathoms are so strange and deep
that they wake you, feverish from your slumber.

Who will you become if you surrender?
If you abandon the exhausting tread
to sink slowly, and steadily
into the velvet green of unknowable fathoms,
will you be dangerously far from the all-illuminating glow of the sun?

Or will the ancient, secret levithan
fold you carefully to her scaly breast
and sift her golden treasures
from the silt and sediment that has settled
upon a trove so vast and bountiful
that the solar glare suddenly seems so garish and so strange.

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