crossing the South China Sea as analgesia

One day we will all be like this—the boat’s sickening pitch, & the delicateness

needless, consumable.

How everything here naturally passes into night, a room

w/o walls.

Could mindlessness keep us alive? Could bright colors?

Tonight I am thinking of the young woman who dreams of her father

being shot in the head. Imagine needing to believe the one you love

has been destroyed.

Now it is after midnight—the spindrift lunar & diaphanous. Here alone on deck

could I make peace w/it all in thirty seconds—the water’s inherent rising, the gasping

for air?

I have never seen such omnipresence, such vast dreamlessness—

but I too am such things.

What does it mean to be eroded? What would be the significance of slipping one leg

over the rail & straddling the indifference?

Yes. Once upon a time we spent three days on a boat out of Kobé, Japan.

All night the waves. All night the somnambulistic urges.

Or how as children we would swim in a hard rain—the lake’s surface ragged & torn,

but underneath

the roots of the water lilies like ladders

trailing down into the marvelous.

Copyright Credit: Quan Barry, "crossing the South China Sea as analgesia" from Controvertibles. Copyright © 2004 by Quan Barry. All rights are controlled by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, PA 15260. Used by permission of the University of Pittsburgh Press.

Source: Controvertibles (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2004)