The Bread We Eat in Dreams

Once there was a boy who lived under the sea.

(Amphibian Man, Aleksey Belyayev 1928)

(Aquaman, Paul Norris and Mort Weisinger 1941)

Depending on the angle

of light through water

his father, the man in the diving bell, some

Belle Epoque Cousteau with a jaunty mustache,

raised him down in the deep

in the lobster-infested ruins

of old Atlantis

where the old songs still echo like sonar.

Or.

He dreamed under Finnish ice

in a steel and windowless experimental habitat

while the sea kept dripping in

of Soviet rockets trailing turquoise

kerosene plumes, up toward Venus,

down toward his sweet, fragile gills

fluttering under the world like a heartbeat.

In 1985

I was six,

learning to swim around my father’s boat

in a black, black lake

outside Seattle, where the pine roots

wound down into the black,

black mud.

The Justice League

had left us. The boy under the sea

(Ichtiander, 1928)

(Arthur Curry, 1959)

wore orange scales and his wife didn’t

love him anymore. The orcas who loved him said:

Hey, man, the eighties are gonna be

tough for everyone. Do what makes you happy.

Mars is always invading.

Eat fish. Dive deep.

Or.

Khrushchev took a crystal submarine

down to those iron cupolas

where the boy under the sea wore his

only suit

and made salt tea in a coral samovar

for the Premier

who wanted to talk about his coin collection

and the possibility

of a New Leningrad under the Barents pack ice

by 2002.

The truth is,

I loved the Incredible Hulk

with a brighter, purer love.

I, too,

wanted to turn so green

and big

no one could hurt me.

I wanted

to get that angry. But when the time came

to bust out

of my Easter dress and roar

I just cried

hoping that the villains I knew

would melt out of shame.

The truth is,

I wasn’t worthy of the Hulk.

But the boy under the sea

the one with four colors

and his own animated series

said:

Hey, girl. Being six in 1985 is no fucking joke.

You’ve got your stepmother

with a fist like Black Manta

and good luck getting a job when you’re grown.

Any day now the Russians might

decide to quit messing around

and light up a deathsky for all to see.

Sometimes I cry, too.

Or.

Down in the dark,

a skinny boy from Ukraine looks up

and his wet, silver neck pulses,

gills like mouths opening and closing. He gurgles:

Did we make it to Venus?

There were supposed to be collectives by now

on Mars and the moon. I would have

liked to see them.

Everyone

is an experiment, devotchka-amerikanka. To see

if a boy can breathe underwater

and talk to the fish.

If a girl can take all her beatings

and still smile for the camera.

It’s 1985 and I’ve never seen the sun.

Sometimes I cry, too.

By the nineties,

the boy under the sea

(Orin, Robert Loren Fleming 1989)

had wealth and a royal pedigree

a wizard for a father and a mother

with a crown of pearls.

I didn’t even recognize him

with his water-fist and his golden beard.

His wife

kept going insane

over and over

like she was stuck in a story

about someone else

and every time she tried to get out

her son died and the narwhals

wouldn’t talk to her anymore.

Or.

The revolution came and went.

The records of those metal domes

and rusted bolts

and a boy down there in the cold

got mixed up with a hundred thousand other files

doused in kerosene

pluming up into the stars.

That’s okay.

the boy in the black says.

I don’t think the nineties

are going to be a peach either.

We do what we’re here for

and Atlantis is for other men.

Once there was a boy under the sea.

I dove down after him

when I was six, fifteen, twenty-six, thirty-two.

Down into the dark,

a small white eel in the cold muck

and into the lake of my father’s boat

I dove down and saw:

brown bass hushing by

a decade of golf balls

the tip of a harpoon

rusted over, bleeding algae

and a light like 1985

sinking away from me,

dead sons and lost wives

narwhals and my hands over my head

under my 2^nd grade desk

too small and never green enough

to protect anyone.

We move apart,

two of us

two of them

one up toward grassy sunlight

and the escape hatch

a narrow, razor-angled way out

of the 20th century.

The other

distant as a lighthouse,

a lithe blue body flashing through heavy water

heading down, into a private,

lightless place.