Aquarium Like crustaceans, our minds entombed in bone, we scrape the muddy bottom deep this ocean murk of time, pulled by currents yet unknown. The distant stars give but a glimpse the golden stillness far above, where hazy suns will float like birds forever calm in silent splendor. Our minds reach for that lucent brightness with fragile, brittle, thin ideas like tiny pincers – teeth that break then tumbling, spinning, spiral down to form the porous the reefs of thought that frame our hopes, our lives, our ways. And so unseen, unsure, unfound, we crawl these crumbling ridges notched, claws just waving feebly in the air, until a time beyond all days a hand comes down to grab our shell and lift us through the sea of time far above the dark of life to the shining dawn that’s pulsing bright – our minds now sudden glorious free, dripping grandeur, drinking light.
originally published in Aug. 2002 Panorama, revised Dec. 2006