Like the girl riding on the whale's back,
I strained for air.
This leviathan called love,
this ancient mammal,
half fish, half mountain,
submerged in the salt,
heading down under wave, wrack, swell-

the leviathan called love took us under to a deep place
where all the sounds were jellylike
and crazed with weird stanchions and beams of light;
where all the green-blue vistas were cavernous mufflings and moans;

this leviathan (let's call it love)
bellied down, away from sun and cloud,
and underneath the humping swell where we were held,
you and I-
we hung on and shut our mouths against the forces,
the blue-green tons of sea and sky upon our lungs...

The leviathan, that ancient beast,
craggy as a mountaintop,
scabbed with barnacles and corals and sucking fish
submerged us into the salty dark of love's oblivion.
I craved for breath, for light, for land!
You liked the nameless deeps, where,
with your lungs bunged up,
you smelt inside yourself the ecstasy of being drowned.

Who can blame me? When the leviathan,
that beast the size of Hades, rose toward the light
to lumber, and spout the sky,
I reached my mouth for air...
Who can blame me?

It was an act beyond my strength or ken,
to strain for air, for light, for the tender blue of day...
I reached to breathe, my love.

I could have stayed down there, with you,
barely remembering my own dear element-
barely remembering the air, the land, the green, green, grass;
barely remembering the sweet indrawing and sliding away of breath,
of luscious, light-filled oxygen beneath my ribs.

I reached my face above the waves and strained for breath,
that was all.
I reached for air, you floundered in the swell,
while the ancient creature,
half fish, half death-by-drowning,
left us stranded in the shallows,
writhing and gaping like a pair of dying cod.