IV.vi

This cold grey sea is the sea of my desire. It churns, roils, spumes. It metastasizes. It whorls, gullies, swells. It is grey. It has its own light, a homeostatic lucency. If you were a helicopter, if you were a gull, looking at the swell, you’d see two things. It doesn’t reflect the sky. You know the sky to be a perfect opalescent grey. It has its own light. Looking down, you’d see its density. Imagine the meniscus to be several thousand layers thick. It’s all skin. It stretches from horizon to horizon. And as it stretches, in ridges and crests, in abyssal hollows and caverns, the top layers tear and hole like stockings, like curling burning skin and leaves of paper, revealing further layers that give and rip apart on the backs of banks of waves, with a sucking revelation of density. It is liquid density – the sea of my desire – and grey with its own light. It is my home. It’s like the North Sea. An oil rig. A cold sea. There’s not light in the whole hemisphere to light it. So it makes its own. Out of salt and bitter coldness. Out of an apparition. That you are a helicopter or a gull, looking down into the swell. Where the horizon ceases to function. Staring into the ladder and abyss of layers of broken-by-spume-rimmed holes, becoming new skins, breaking in an endless descent of surface. There is tension, from horizon to horizon. Nothing is heavy. Nothing is light. There is an undifferentiated language of ceaseless downward movement. For all the horizontal struggle. To your wing-tips you feel it. Navigation is useless. And the holes in the waves become faces with mouths. Undifferentiated muscle and sinew, grey-white, after the yellow fat of the arm has been removed. A cold grey sea. Now it is the desert. Now it is the desert, the sea of my desire. How many are lost looking for what was there before? Now it is the desert, stretching from horizon to horizon. It shimmers. It abrades the air. It spins maps of dreaming. A munitions dump. It’s hot and red. And a silent white snow falls like salt and skin. No birds sing. It’s quiet. So quiet. Like nobody expected it would be. It’s my home.