Breach 

He was there, and then he wasn’t. 

This rather uncanny cancel. 

This quotient gone quizzical, 

we tilt our heads; 

   we purse our lips. 

We of gill beguiled prove 

   an ordained hypothesis 

that upon this, our moment of death, 

we all invert and float upward. 

 

Divine? 

   Please define. 

Just how could this be so? 

So oh so,   oh so    buoyant. 

And I’d like to point out 

that this act is not some 

fatuous figment of perceived theology. 

That the horror inherent to 

falling off the edge of the world 

is only relevant to those who 

comprehend the act of falling. 

 

And here there remains a heretical belief 

that upon the moment of death, 

we somehow come to fall, 

yet for those of dorsal fin, 

such grave gravity is a 

nonsensical    sensation. 

Be he fish-ilk of piscine kind and mind, 

the belief that should one observe 

a phenomenon known as bubbles, 

(be that secular arcane or 

profound to astound religious) 

the aquatic consensus was that 

they only moved in one direction. 

 

Yes, but upward to where? 

To air is omen, 

to there rise, divine. 

Or so they would have us believe. 

What we fathom as such a fathom 

remains a depth of understanding 

that here the presence of gills precludes 

any need for breath o’ atmosphere. 

 

Why rise? 

What need to ascend at all? 

Yet there in that curdled chromosome spiral 

lies a mutant gene which denotes 

a quality of lung aspiration. 

Sown seed of aberrant need 

to arise and arrive at some blessed elation. 

There to perceive some cryptic concept of sky. 

This an aerial conjecture above and 

beyond our submerged comprehension. 

 

He was there and then he wasn’t. 

His sudden carnal absence a 

manifest moment of awe, 

whilst those of us left behind 

professed such disappearance 

as nothing less than   rapture. 

 

He was there and then he wasn’t. 

Yet then again,    he was. 

It was a phenomenon of which 

we came to know as “breaching”. 

To leap bodily out of existence, 

and then only a moment later, 

return with a splash back in. 

 

To “splash”? 

That… That is a concept 

I find difficult to define, though 

I’m told that once you’ve experienced it, 

   you absolutely know it. 

Indeed, those who have 

chance encountered it, 

find said sensation    exhilarating. 

Dare say, so soul addictive. 

 

Myself?     No. 

I would not    do that. 

For what is this life 

but my aquatic strife 

in roe-sown stupor stasis? 

This stagnant status quo 

the basis for staid sturgeon 

complacence. 

 

And whilst I tread water  ‘neath water, 

divine manna drops down heaven sent, 

from that scintillating surface above. 

 

Beneath a cover of celestial seraphim, 

here seduced I swim over to investigate, 

and there note upon its shimmering side 

an array of somewhat cryptic letters. 

That which reads to the effect of 

“ACME’s Finest Fishing Lure”. 

 

Bug or   bauble-bait    I bite. 

And there the breach. 

And there    the splash. 

Indeed, 

I was once there, 

that is… 

           ‘til I wasn’t. 

 

Ó2023 Jack David Hubbell