Exploring the Pastime Reaches and Beyond

Things in the dark exist but are not realized. Perhaps with wings they wait for enacting light. I start out as the sky descends to the visible spectrum and begins. Midmorning I find in a lab a blue magnetic fluid: revolving in the stress of gauss, the source of blue resides. November nights, up to the first snow, derive from this seat of blue. I spend a month reflecting at Palomar. My delicate fourteen tons I bring to bear on galaxies: their lonely shine harbors on my dustless, understanding curve. I come to a mountain out of season. The brass benchmark telling the height is under ice. Without witness, without cease a blizzard pummels the summit's face. I reach the pole. Here at the axis the wobble and grind is audible. My compass tries to point straight down. It, too, deceived: Having achieved one absolute, the source of north, to find that south surrounds, is all but it. The Humboldt Current has my boat and its mile of line straight down. Now and then, fishermen haul in the inexplicable along with seabream, haddock, squid. I hook a coelacanth, thought long extinct, and brain it with an oar. Nose to the bottom I shove off from the hundred fathom curve. Slow footage of mud unreeling through my mind, the miles of decline become my age. Hauled up someday by accident, rupturing in the lost pressure, my look will say how knowing feels. Living among the trilobites I learn you cross great lengths of time by stilling the waiting in yourself. From scavengers I see how you can live off your own dead kind. I gum the grit of a tidal flat and have no name. A chance letter brings me home, telling how I was found. Returned I sit like water in a jar, light from a window passing through, a slow rain of precipitate remembering the bottom.