The ocean holds light like a bottle, 
color wasted to darkness in its depths.

High above the sun-soaked surface,
we watch the current draw a turtle

across the course of the ship.
The carrier splits the dome of his sky_

casts him down under calloused keel,
down into the screws’ mad vortex.

A solitary turtle, reeling past the blades,
tumbling through the boil of cavitation, 

can never fathom what world expands
above the venter of this leviathan. 

He is like we shelled turtles
who hang over the catwalks and

gaze upon the skin of his world_
an endless bottle of light.

//SIX MONTHS//