Brick-thick walls, portholes, circular doors,
cold bolts to ensure you’ll stay sealed in during the plunge,
the pressure, the absence, the bends, the hanging
like a pendulum in your tiny steel room.
It will shiver your timbers.
It will shatter your self. It will look like the blue-black pit-mouth
of hell, & you won’t see or hear or smell a single earthly thing.
No street noise. No sex, sweaty & scrambling. No phone. No family.
Nothing to gratelike sandagainst your nerves,
& that’ll be okay with you,
& you’ll love your bathysphere. You’ll love the queer fish
with no eyes, nor any need for them & the creatures whose bodies
are galaxies of light. You might listen to your wristwatch ticking
in the chamber & remember how Aristotle said whosoever
delights in solitude is either a wild beast or a god,
but you’re neither. He was wrong. You’ll hate Aristotle.
You want the tremendous mystery. The ocean. God.
Want to stare it in the face. Want to feel no fear.
Quiet, so quiet. You’ll long to go deeper.
At the bottom, you hear, it’s light and clear.
Bathysphere
Show Comments (
)
Comments are automatically closed two weeks after an article's initial publication. See our comments policy for more.
The latest from america
“Inside the Vatican” host Colleen Dulle shares how her visit to Argentina gave her a deeper understanding into Francis’ emphasis on “being amongst the people” and his belief that “you can’t do theology behind a desk.”
Christians who have lived in Nagorno-Karabakh for 2,000 years are being driven out by Azerbaijan. Will world leaders act?
The problem is not that TikTok users feel disappointed about the potential loss of an entertaining social platform; it is that many young people see a ban on TikTok as the end of, or at least a major disruption to, their social life.
Two new Broadway productions cast these two towering figures in sharp relief.