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Cora Greenhill

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Borrowed Grace

Clumsy in snorkel and flippers
that drag on the sand until I’m afloat
when breasts and belly hang weightless:
the water lending grace that’s not our own
to our white bodies floating like distorted moons
through liquid skies that deepen
from radiant blue through twilight jade to indigo
as the sea-bed suddenly shelves.

I watch an octopus shift under its stone,
puff sand, twitch a tentacle,
then drift to where the ocean has no floor
and the clear darkness is alight
with multitudes of gold-green, nib-sized fish.
Somewhere down there I suspend my disbelief
receive the message emerging from this deep,
written on white tampons, unstained as the moon turned:

somewhere in me was a sea
large enough for a shoal to swim in
a sea-bed safe enough to sink in
send out tentacles and feed.

 

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