your grief was so big that 
when you turned up your palms to me 
i cracked on contact

in an instant my lungs filled with water
parenchyma turned to pumice 
and I fell backwards in a slow dive 
through the thermocline abyss 

the world was a tunnel of light
first weak then mottled
 until it was gone

for four months i drifted quietly 
past lost cities 
spying through unhinged balustrades 
tube worms growing on parquet floors 
the translucent skins of young girlfriends 
baking bread on tectonic plates 
wounds slashed in the volcanic sea mount 
so necrotic that they created 
their own weather patterns of rot

and finally settled mute and decisive 
in the primordial silt

an infinite pause
a crypt-silent nautilus of waste 
pregnant with the heavy thing 
that hope becomes when it is dead

in deep sea slow motion
a ghost crab pads softly past
puffing up years of gentile sediment 
with its fragile finger bones

four days later it is gone from view
having silently slipped past the curve of the horizon