.neptune

.

After the months spent in utero, walking feels strange.
Ground is sound in colour, synaesthesia beneath the heels,
watered down to reveal a horizon of endless blue, and Neptune.
Opening himself like a oracle. He is all mouth: a throat
of thunder, teeth a string of binary numbers. Kether of kelp,
barnacle bones strewn in every bottled message, each letter of
HELP scrawled into the shoreline. A missing-person clue.

Feet rubbed raw, he heads for the ocean, where those water-
logged wishers wash such surface wounds with their salted tears.
It's a pain that's only real when you're reeling, that you can only
find when hanging from fish-hooks and the coral-plugged ceilings
in the backwaters of your mind, though it's hidden behind
every dark glass. Basketcase, they may have said, but it's a fatal
tendency to identify the whole being with one interest,

and this will give him a certain distinction when he's dead;
an heir of tragedy. He looks out to sea, and sees white horses
ride the rip tide, dragging their kelpie cries and their jesus hair
through the air. They seem almost to catch and cloy, buoyed by
their bloated bodies. He would rather breathe water. But no –
he's over-exposed, caught under x-ray, so that only the bones show
through, blue-blooded. And by this, he knows, he's finally found his way
home.

.

* * *

Neptune was the god of water, the sea and (quite randomly, I feel) horses in Roman mythology.

The final stanza of this poem pays quite heavy tribute to Sylvia Plath's Medusa - one of my favourites.

The line 'a fatal tendency to identify the whole being with one interest' is a quote from critic A.C. Bradley describing the fatal flaw of Shakespearean tragic heroes. It's one I had to learn for my English Lit. exam which has stuck with me.

And if anyone's wondering what the hell this is all about, it's about the mother. It's always about the mother.

You can see the rest of my ever-growing mythology series here or here.