Bobby Parrott
Sunken Cathedrals
for Claude Debussy
It’s how I know of the design—
How I see the ruins, hear
the cerulean light as it trembles
from disembodied. I almost let go
when a shimmer of harp strings
evokes my submarine child, whispers
my secret name. Your notes
urge forward the soft harpoon
before my mother’s breast. I fill
on the galactic milk of Proteus, wheel
in your icy inversions of moonlight,
sup from a brimming carafe
of Clair de Lune. Delicate thimbled
pulses held in her thin fingers,
the Girl with the Flaxen Hair
sighs her breath into the Afternoon
of a Faun. Across the aperture
of her flute an arabesque, a curvature
of glass violets— yet from where
this melody? I shudder open,
porous, unvalved in the language
of watery currents. How a fabric
of Reverie pulls my shape, voices
my arrival, this planet of suns.
Your baton elongates, stairwells
inward, note by uncanny note
until the melody's ancient future
finds me here, its iris a portal
home. Snowflakes Dancing
their warm submersion, singing me
from under this house of bones.
