Moon Over
Brad Leithauser
Scuba1 pers2（戴水肺的潜水员） will sometimes drown
within a night sea
after confusing up and down.
It seems so basic up/down and yet,
immersed in a black neutral buoyancy（浮力）,
the world's boundaries all wet,
a person may mislay his only meaningful
compass the heart in his head
and mistake Earth's centripetal3 pull
for that other mustering4 of gravity:
a firmament5 widespread
with stars, over a wind blowing free.
*
But the figure the tiny figure floundering,
lost, in an unlit sea. . . He's trapped
like a sleeper6 trapped in a raw, tightening7
nightmare, who knows he knows a way out of here
though he keeps forgetting
the key.
How do we wake? How do we clear
the borne mind of its body and arrive
gasping, half gone, not gone
on the surface's groundless shore, not just alive
but secure in the moon's artful netting,
whose catch tonight may be one of those rapt
souls that thinks to see another dawn?
