Hylas and the Water Nymphs (1896) - John William Waterhouse (1849-1917)
Jonell Esmé Jel'Enedra
Learning the Dead Man's Float
Stop struggling.
Don’t wrestle this deep sadness
like Jacob’s relentless angel
that would hold your head beneath the
surface of the water,
that would force you to inhale
every tear,
leave you gagging and sprawled
dislocated on the ruined landscape
of your life.
Stop asking
the impossible questions:Why did no-one teach you how to swim?
Where is the bottom of this bottomless grief?Stop struggling.
Belly down and grow gills.
Learn from the fishes.
Learn from the Owl fish,
whose eyes are round and
radiant as Marie Curie’s glowing platters.From the Giant Red Mysid,
who transforms terror, like an alchemist,
into clouds of opalescent snow.Read the message from the Sea Pens,
scribbling like sparklers
across the inky blackLearn from the Lantern fish
the way that light can thrive
even in the darkest dark.One day, one night,
you will roll onto your back,
and you will not differentiate
between blue of sea, blue of sky.Between the constellations
in this luminous water,
the fiery pinpoints in that overhead night.
Bio:
Jonell Esmé Jel’enedra has been a field hand, soda jerk, book reviewer, waitress, ditch digger, schoolteacher, sales clerk, and used clothing pricer. Currently she is a mother of four, occasional poet, and library employee. She has been published in Ally, Quarry West, Writing for Our Lives, Porter Gulch Review, and several anthologies. She is a winner of a Mary Lonnberg Smith Award and was awarded first place in Quarry West’s Best of Monterey Bay Poets 2000. Her first volume of poetry Stilt Walking at Midnight is forthcoming from Hummingbird Press. She is a long-time resident of Santa Cruz, California.
