The boat is gray that wakes from inside
the anchor, 300 feet down, where divers
laugh at empty oxygen, because they’re
skeletons eating Halloween clam-shells
from the eyes inside the planks. Air
dissolved in this water feels like bait-fish
hooked to a thumb, scraps of their fins
are almost starlight at the surface. The boat
meanwhile is drifting like an island full of snow
that melted from a dinosaur’s spine feathers.

I wish I could tell you how to dive
inside a molecule, not like in a magic movie
computer camera trick dubbed in hieroglyphics.
It’s more like the creature that sells heaven
to angels. And it’s more like a castle shrinking
around you, everything on top of Atlantis,
everything’s crazy dream, like prophesying
fish bones and oyster shells fattening the invaders
because somebody used to be a saint up a palm tree.

I wish I could also build you a house in Atlantis
where you could fry pancakes, and sing the blues,
and watch a herd of stegosaurs evolve into willows.
At the end of the year, you’d be ready to surface.
And I’d be strumming along. The door doesn’t lock.
The kids swim with dolphins. There’s a boat
on the roof, and it sings, too. The sky lives there
and it is wishing for itself a world.