Toward Wholeness

“Toward Wholeness” by Ellery Akers

POETRY:

What Rises in the Sea at Night, Rises in Dreams


“By the time the last light has faded from the sky, the surface layers of the water,
so empty before, are a teeming soup of planktonic animal life.”
The Life of the Ocean, N.J. Berrill


Every night the largest migration of animals in the world
rises while we sleep –
arrow worms clear as glass, comb jellies,
salps. When the first sting of sun
strikes the water, they sink back down.
And while I fall asleep, some unlived life
floats toward me,
or parts of myself I pushed down
rise, starved as they are, and scan my eyelids
for some kind of recognition
before they sink into the steep drop-off of the brain.
One night I dreamt I heard a golden tone;
a bell rang, but it was a bell made of krill,
climbing out of blackness so cold it stank of cold.
And in the sea, too, there are bells of jellyfish,
rafts of plankton, pulsing with light, that swim to the surface
and rock back and forth.
Fishermen know this:
they shoot their drift nets at night
into a sheen of dinoflagellates:
the wake of their boats “shines like silver fire”;
you can read a newspaper if you lean over the bow.
One man wrote his signature on a Pyrosoma
and saw his name flash in letters of fire,
and when he went to sleep, he dreamt
that deep in the sea, where rain doesn’t penetrate,
or the sound of rain,
his name was climbing towards him
through the benthic cold:
night after night it kept trying to reach him
through the deep speech of the sea.