The Last Word Heard Poem by Joanne Togati

The night is a circle of round ripples from a sinking fish
A fish that was always a fish swimming its own current,
but to man it can seem a mermaid
and like most men who prefer not to swim the depths and face the dark layers of the agate waters
he does not feel at home in the territory of her lazy current
and so if the waters wash his buildings away, a man can not endure the crisis.

But I have always swam the ruins of men and found nothing perturbing, just sunken relics over run with plankton of a tarnished green
and I leave them to dream the reflection of memories from faces and dresses and legs hurrying and arms flying to meet their lovers, all left as dizzying images in the broken shards of glass,
and I swim farther until the light strikes me to rise into the world of man, where I had left him, my other body, the earthly one.

On the surface, his eyes full of my scaled fading shadow and tears sprouting at the sides
because I one day cast myself out on my own fishing line.
He did not see me go under,
but he could feel as I felt myself being eaten alive.
When he reeled me in, abashed I said,

What is life without the symphonies of youth and risk spun in my undercurrent and the marbled agate eyes that distinguish me from the rest of my race.
The minute I am sunken under, the unchartered landscape of your world shifts through mine, almost naturally,
yet not totally,
covering my body like a school of tiny fish over an underwater mountain, to the spaces you have never felt because you did not imagine.

What is my swimming from you when I have always chosen to keep its silence locked,
to leave the rocks unturned,
to not diminish the reef of a thousand colors that we had once touched, as I touch a thousand more.
I see the unspeakable and still speak,
yet I give my thoughts back to the sky while you hold onto yours for all the reasons that make you quiet.
And here, I give you the line that holds me.

So why must you cry when you can reel me in at anytime of day or night
If I cut myself in the deep
it may leave a scar
things that happen to me there are for my good
and nothing more
because what use is this form I've taken,
for if just to get wet and not see all the creation
between us, would I have ever been able to see you from the distance,
and swim into your arms?
you make me question
what good it has done you
to allow your eyes my passing shadow.