Kraken

The outer edge of each curve is a clear if faint shifting line: the inner edge fades imperceptibly. And it all vanishes before it has risen higher than a woman's hand. 

It goes on rising, unseen: the scent comes to my nostrils. Coffee. But this terrible weariness weighs and weighs. No sleep touches it. Can this be age? There is no refreshment here: only a staving off. I rise to the surface more slowly, each time. I am more waterlogged, more densely built, less hopeful, every time; my horizon is more bounded, my spirit more petulant. How could any god even get purchase on this slippery, sodden mess, let alone lift it up?

I am huge and old, huge and old: a kraken who imagines it has some appointment with the sky. Delusional. I mistake my own monstrous coils for ghost riders: the shudder of my gills makes the skin of the water twitch for miles roundabout. The higher I rise, the lower the pressure, the giddier I get. All these years I told myself stories about the sun. Now a smear of caustic white, burning the enormous glassy darkness of my eye, informs me that I had left out the most important fact: it burns.

Fields of seablush and camas lily;
fields we knew when the world was young.