Philip Gross
Bathysphere
The pressure of the world they’re winched
down into: just double-glazed inches away
a manifest silence, like a slow continual blow,
a car crash impact from all sides at once.
Near freezing, they sweat in their shorts,
Messrs Barton and Beebe and their quickening
breathing as the bathysphere, ironclad
eyeball, with one porthole and a blunted
headlight beam pries into an unknowing
thick as silt.
And if beings of clearness
and light were lowered down amongst us
wouldn’t they gasp at the first grey glimpse
of rubble like a landfall, and wouldn’t they flinch
and goggle should some grey-on-grey shape move?
Page(s) 21
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