Of Aquanauts
James E. Allman, Jr.
—
Submersibles tethered: strangers
to see into the silence
the hidden coelacanth suspended
in the womb. They sing in high-pitched Doppler
to glint its scales; when nothing sings back,
Calypso’s monitors are black
(black is the sound of nothing there).
On the screen you are crosshatched—
mysterious like an echo: an obscure, half-told
fable forged by the clatter
of hammer banging anvil: my Hephaestus, my Hephaestus, my ear,
my
smithy ear and you in the clanging.
In the black, black everywhere
of the nothing there you consider
lightproofness:
the immense aloneness in silence,
the comprehension of:
“you’re not alive, if not ever heard.”
You consider disappearance with
pantomimed screams; this is how
it is through liquid-filled lungs, but
the soul wills to be heard;
it wills to see the other side of nothing; it
utters, it utters, it utters instead
from the heart a constant pulse, pause and pulse
to look out as the ultrasound explores within.
—
James E. Allman, Jr.’s credentials—degrees in biology and business—qualify him for an altogether different trade. However, he easily tires of the dissected and austerely economized. He is a dabbler with an expensive photography-habit and a poetry-dependency. Nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2010, his work appears, or is forthcoming, in The Los Angeles Review, decomP, Anemone Sidecar and Splash of Red, amongst others. He’s written reviews for Rattle as well as other journals, blogs, and sundries, and is the co-founder of an artist community called Continuum.
