Broken white lines on a blueprint, the zigzag of foam where he

_  _ scudded before he sank, trailing a singed spindrift of feathers I

almost retraced, mining the lode as deep as he fell, lured below

_  _ by his lodestone; but that magnetic boy I’d early worshipped as

a god was hollow notes plucked on ancient cliffs, his name still

_  _ vagrant, no more worthy of invading me with bronze commands

than another drowning child who rode a dolphin over the waves,

_  _ homeward to a shore I refuse to reach.  My path lies neither nor,

triumph nor defeat, lazing off a rubber Zodiac to skin-dive down

_  _ the pinnacles of Silver Bank, plunge up the abyss of coral-heads,

rubbed by the weaving rainbow-nets of angelfish, wrasses, tangs.

_  _ One night I’d seen two huddling males spyhop, jostle the mother

boat like a pair of drunken frat-men, wagging their knurled mugs

_  _ and rambling for hours in beeps, tocks, thuds, whistles and burps,

rowdies on good behavior.  I’d also known them otherwise, when

_  _ clouds zebraed the ocean white and black, three or four breaching

from the tousled brine through hoops big as the moon, struggling

_  _ to butt a ball of wind through goal-posts of sun and shade, belly-

flopping on jumbled green hills, twisting like blubbery kites.  I’d

_  _ watched a single humpback stretch his flukes aloft like palms up-

raised, the gesture unaccountable.  But then this afternoon, a calf

_  _ steals close beside me, ratcheting his pace to my sea-turtle crawl.

Each flexion of flippers and tail, each crease of naked pearl-gray,

_  _ glistens in the mask-filtered haze, baby-oiling the infant, ten-foot

trunk, his newness serene and well-met, greeting the clumsy pink

_  _ four-finny fish like a pre-school athlete shedding his bounty on a

runt, across chasms of species division, scorn, and size.  His eye,

_  _ pinched to a slit by the dazzling swell, winks at me just before he

nods, quivers and shoots ahead with a brief undulation of the tail.

_  _ And all the while the mother whale balloons to our right, her salt-

and-pepper oar dangling by a monolithic flank; here the umpteen-

_  _ wheeler escort lumbers into view, rolling square beneath me; now

my pulse slows to a halt and I sense no fear, no qualm, only ocean

_  _ condensing into time I become, a muscular, sunken island of flesh

heaving upward with a power that will never harm me, a power to

_  _ which I belong… darkness rising, light unwinding in the half-dark

language of whales, and I am light… until they vanish like ghosts.