Cave Pool

We pick the fish out with our torches,

the blind cave fish that move in a blind shoal,

fan out, contract, fan out,

like breathing of a single organism.

They eat algae off each other's scales,

the film that thickens in their vacant eyes.

Our light has touched them,

though their sockets do not register the glare.

Puce, intimate flesh-shades, crimson,

they are whiskerless sleek forms

with only translucent tissue fins

to pulse them through the dark.

They regroup, corpuscular on black,

responding to a beam

they have not felt in history;

dazed by the sensation, they waver

in an ordered rank, like birds on lines

expecting crumbs or lightning.

We have drawn a protean diagram

with our bright torches on the water-

until we're moved to speak,

and they, not frightened, but because the spell

breaks at the echo in the stone,

hardly flex their bodies and file out

as messengers with news of light and sound

into the earth. Our light cannot follow:

one by one they pass down corridors

that vein beneath our feet, our continent,

to the darker heart that makes

pulse-echo of this penetrable dark.