Moon Over

Brad Leithauser

Scuba divers（戴水肺的潜水员） will sometimes drown

 within a night sea

 after confusing up and down. 

It seems so basic — up/down — and yet,

 immersed in a black neutral buoyancy（浮力）,

 the world's boundaries all wet,

a person may mislay his only meaningful

 compass — the heart in his head —

 and mistake Earth's centripetal pull

for that other mustering of gravity:

 a firmament widespread

 with stars, over a wind blowing free. 

                              * 

But the figure — the tiny figure floundering,

 lost, in an unlit sea. . . He's trapped

 like a sleeper trapped in a raw, tightening

nightmare, who knows he knows a way out of here

 though he keeps forgetting

 the key.

               How do we wake? How do we clear

the borne mind of its body and arrive —

 gasping, half gone, not gone —

 on the surface's groundless shore, not just alive

but secure in the moon's artful netting,

 whose catch tonight may be one of those rapt

 souls that thinks to see another dawn?