Bee MacGuire
Meditation

Lay off, will you
I'm skating as fast as I can
thin ice, star-pocked, gaudy
flash of scrap metal
glitter of tin foil,
like something a crow would steal
Lay off, will you? Don't you see I can't skate any faster
Oh God, oh Jesus,
did you hear that?
those harsh staccato blade notes
crack crack
spiralling inward
star fractures in reverse
crick crack crick
metallic dialogues as haunting as beluga songs
their echoes slicing the sky
lopping off the hilltops
Oh God, now they're converging
whoopsadaisy
bottoms up
jagged fingernails
slipping sliding along,
letting go
black water closing over
down, down, pale skinned, eyes wide, turning cartwheels
          and cartwheels in the still silent chaos
down down maybe a light year
gagging on phosphorus now,
down to where the night creatures with long ruby eyes circle 
          lazily shifting their fat Day-Glo haunches
down at last to the bottom where
the water itself is incandecscent
liquid light,
breath of mer people
down, down at last
to lie half-suspended in the luminous silt
feeling the warm source water issuing from the ruby mouth
          of a cave
to lie spreadeagled splayed in the white swaying waterweeds
open, open
straddling all of them, all the sunken galaxies
the music of the atoms gushing rhythmically in and out
every cell washed clear, shimmering to the cadence of the
          ice song, the beluga song
one music, one note