Cave dive - Joe Dunthorne

Every sixteen metres of depth is equivalent to one alcoholic drink.

– Mauro Bertolini, The Diver’s Handbook


He remembers being six,
lying on his back beneath a kitchen chair,
gazing up at his father’s unmapped nostrils,
his mother’s skirt riffling past like a spotted
eagle ray. Underneath the dining table,
he found pencil marks: a quarter-circle
and two words underscored. Possible Extension.
Back then, it was a code or perhaps
the solution to a code.
          On the cave bed,
it takes a blue whale’s long blink to fathom
what one plus one turns in to. The sky peers
down from blue-green slots like the lamp fittings
of his youth. His slow mind thinks time
is just another surface, he can pass through
the swirling halocline that keeps us
from our pasts:
          the fresh and the preserved.
Back in his father’s study, pouring a bag
of marbles across the rug. In the glow
from the tentacled lampshade, he holds
up his Bosser, sees himself swimming
in its spiral reef.
          Letting drift his aqualung,
he is either young or drunk. From his lips
he scatters balls of glass.

Retirado daqui.