What the Whale Dreams
He stumbles on feet
no longer capable of bearing his weight,
goes deeper to where fish are more plentiful.
There was a balance here, a choice,
such that having been made, was irrevocable.
Still, in his dreams, he remembers:
mountain glades, odors with which forests abound,
that first dive, the necessity
for holding his breath for increasing periods.
Now he re-experiences the darkness of the bottom,
The realization that in largeness
lies a double-edged sword:
freedom from the belligerence
with which the deep redounds,
the very pressures of which
might once have made him implode,
and the unremitting mind-diminishing obligation to spend
so much of his existence
searching for sustenance,
the sheer pleasure, the exhilaration,
as he rises, like a hot-air balloon, from one world to another,
and awakens
in the full glaring sparkle
of the sunlight.