Arthur Ginsberg
Flashlight FishNight dive on the wreck
of the Stella Maru, sunk 1942
off Papua New GuineaThey assemble each night
at seven o’clock
in the wheelhouse
of the Stella Maru
when darkness
blankets the deep.
Spill out
in radiant beams
along the quarterdeck
and rusted seams,
a line of glittering dust
floating all the way
to the bow.
Such bioluminescent green
lights our descent
through frond and current,
past the ghostly masts
wreathed by anemones.
What men died here
and here assault our eyes
with fireworks
of lives undone,
evanescently beautiful now
through bitter windows of time?
They pour from hatch and porthole,
the flashlight fish
on their nocturnal hunt,
searching for stanza break
what they may have done with their lives,
signaling us
with semaphore eyes
to ascend;
if only we were lit within!
Neptunes’s GardenShe, who loves the sea,
long-legged in her curly wave,
all flecked beneath the turtled surf,
slips through the net
of mediocrity, astride
the hump-head wrasse,
to rest upon the spawning reef
where I, the weedy scorpion fish
angle in the polyped bloom
to tempt her with my lure,
and gaze on frond-wreathed face;
Rhinopias is my name. She,
who loves the ship-rocked sea,
by love’s own fault
is cast perpetually
to salt-licked sky, away
from time’s back door,
and rides the silver tips
of sharkskin wings
through Anthias and blue anemones,
on neap tide to scalloped shore. She,
who sees beyond my camouflage,
welcomes me on stubby fins,
singing Ulysses’ song;
I promise not to sting. Behold
the fisherman’s teeming purse
spread wide beneath the golden dawn.
Bio:
Arthur Ginsberg is a poet and underwater photographer living in Seattle, WA.
