Woman Watches Ocean on a Reef through a Glass-Bottomed Boat
In the ocean one fish
swallows the other:
a geometric progression of
loss.
You are bigger than I.
The calamity of love
swelling out larger than us.
And what destiny partakes of
our dilemma?
Swallows the cause and effect:
eyes and kissing mouths and enlarged
parts wanting to breathe and wanting.
There is no gentle sense to this.
Is there?
Only a kind of terror
at the chain
of events, the scale of loss, the ordered
destruction one against the other—
all that something larger
awaits its moment.
Angela Jackson, "Woman Watches Ocean on a Reef through a Glass-Bottomed Boat" from And All These Roads Be Luminous. Copyright © 1998 by Angela Jackson. Reprinted by permission of TriQuarterly Books.
Source:
And All These Roads Be Luminous
(TriQuarterly Books, 1998)
