Moon Over

Brad Leithauser

Scuba divers（戴水肺的潜水员） will sometimes drown

within a night sea

after confusing up and down.

It seems so basic — up/down — and yet,

immersed in a black neutral buoyancy（浮力）,

the world's boundaries all wet,

a person may mislay his only meaningful

compass — the heart in his head —

and mistake Earth's centripetal pull

for that other mustering of gravity:

a firmament widespread

with stars, over a wind blowing free.

*

But the figure — the tiny figure floundering,

lost, in an unlit sea. . . He's trapped

like a sleeper trapped in a raw, tightening

nightmare, who knows he knows a way out of here

though he keeps forgetting

the key.

How do we wake? How do we clear

the borne mind of its body and arrive —

gasping, half gone, not gone —

on the surface's groundless shore, not just alive

but secure in the moon's artful netting,

whose catch tonight may be one of those rapt

souls that thinks to see another dawn?