ABOUT TO DISAPPEAR / *photo by Amalie Flynn*

AMPHIBIOUS

In Hokusai’s “Kanagawa Wave,” the boatmen
look like a school of masquerading fish
about to disappear into the vast trough between waves,
the scene a masque for the knowing seascape.

Underwater, Ahab,
pinned to the great white
creature, like a wave that has
disappeared into silence.

In memory’s slow dancing,
flesh now dissolved,
seafloor muck covers bones
and shark-tooth nodules.

Out of the bubbling methane,
Ahab is reborn with tripod limbs
and tiny feet, the wooden leg
now a trail of seafloor slime,
amphibious.

Jim Kraus

Jim Kraus lives in Honolulu, where he is professor of English at Chaminade University. He is a swimmer and surfer and father of two daughters. His essay “Poetry and Anti-Nuclearism” was recently published in the volume Toxic Immanence: Decolonizing Nuclear Legacies and Futures. His poetry has been published in numerous places, including Virginia Quarterly Review, Pequod, Unmuzzled Ox, Kentucky Poetry Review, Bamboo Ridge, Hawaii Review, Neologism Poetry Journal and elsewhere. He has recently been teaching a poetry class at Halawa Prison in Honolulu.

1 Comment

Liam says:

August 9, 2023 at 9:33 am

Well done, Jim! “Rather carried down alive to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and fro before his passive eyes; and the miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps; and among the joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities, Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs. He saw God’s foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad. So man’s insanity is heaven’s sense; and wandering from all mortal reason, man comes at last to that celestial thought, which, to reason, is absurd and frantic; and weal or woe, feels then uncompromised, indifferent as his God.” Here, then, is wisdom amphibious.