wonder world

one:
At the beach I sit and wait for something.
I sit on a chair that is so low that I can feel the sand easing itself around to accommodate the space that I take up.
I sit and look at the ocean and then I go into the ocean.
I never know what to do with myself once I’m in the water.
I dive through some waves.
I float.
Sometimes I try to find the right way to be in the water, to trick my body into thinking it’s a substance like air.
It is a thick version of air, I tell my body.
It is cool thick air.
Waves are wet wind, I insist.
My body is never convinced, and something comes. The feeling comes, invited or not.
And I go back towards the shore into being in just air.

two:
I get tumbled, which is something that hasn’t happened since I was younger and smaller and less aware of the ocean’s behavior.
I saw the big white wave and realized that I would be tumbled and I let myself be tumbled like a pebble in the big white wave.
I didn’t open my eyes, but I wish I had. There was no space or time for anything like that – but wouldn’t it be a sight!
That timeless anti-gravity chamber that the ocean held me in, forcing me down which I eventually found out was up.
It tricked me into believing that up and down were switched – the compasses spinning in their cases!
I lived in dark sound for countless eternal moments.

And then, the sand at my feet, the water’s surface at my waist and the shore, the horizon, the sky.
And the world is back because I am back.
And the world was there, complete and tame the whole time.
And, also there, was the wide existence of things in it that continue relentlessly without me there to activate any of it with my consciousness.


How comforting and sad to realize the tumble is over.



three:
I get tumbled. And this is a rough one. This is God's wet hands pushing and pulling. My face and shoulder scrape hard and surprising against what I expect to be the surface, a place for breathing. That sandy ocean floor didn't feel anything like concrete when I was walking out into the then harmless water. It is a joke what a sloshing hollow mouth moth this mass has metamorphed into.
This tumble is a real punishment, I start to believe (still not allowed by the white water to rise for breath). I'm being taught some sort of heartless lesson. Smacked brusquely by an elder sibling and told it will do me good--toughen me up.
Only this isn't just any superior -- this is the elder -- the toxic air in my chest begins its stinging pounding. This is the It and perhaps even the All. The biggest big. The constant and terrifying rattle, the pervasive frequency we only hear when the refrigerator stops its infernal buzzing.
My hand, which I don't realize is grasping for anything until -- finds itself full of meaningless sand, and then, in the next instant, emptied by the slippery thug, Ocean. There is something greensalty in my mouth. I am the nonsound blasting of the underworld. I am disintegrating into vibrating layers of drifted seafloor. The wave is subsiding, quieting, but I am still held within it. It is beginning to be warm and simple in its destruction of me. Little me in big it. "I will," I say to it, "breath in your velvet salt air." If it comes to that. But it never does, and so, it obediently doesn't.
I am, predictably, blasted by my promise out of the wet dream and into the dry one. Up and out, I am spat. Past and present. Born and gasping.

four:
I am in you again, tumbled and thrashed in your furious lather. Reminded that humans are no longer aquatic, but still hanging on, with hairy white ape-knuckles to our genetic heritage.
You are forcing water up my nose and it hurts like hell. I didn't agree to this. I did not submit to your salty velvet air. Not yet. I refuse to breathe you in, but you break and enter, my nowhere head throbbing with the thick salty froth you've forced into my blow hole nostrils. I'm no whale. I can't find shit with my wildly howling sonar.
I'm just little and you're just big and you are swallowing me wetly in your cold blue mouth. I wait for your will to quiet, to spare me, floatingly, until next time. By then I'll grow gills.