A journal of art + literature engaging with nature, culture, the environment & ecology

How to Dive with Sharks

Patricia Davis-Muffett, Rockville, Maryland, USA

 

1

At Big Scare, when you enter the water—

in the usual way, backrolling off the boat, 

one hand on your mask and reg—

it will be too rough to surface. Try not to remember

that time at the Great Barrier Reef, when, after steaming 

on the liveaboard boat all day and night,

you realized why they were teaching you

how to inflate the emergency dive flag:

that you might get separated

under the murky depth, be forced 

to rise, take your safety stop

alone, hanging twenty feet below,

and when you came up, the current 

might have swept you too far from the boat 

to be seen, your dark head bobbing 

like a sea turtle swimming or an aging buoy, 

and you would need that strip of orange

to guide the boat toward your helpless soul.

 

2

Focus on the technical skill:

negative entry—empty air from your vest,

roll off the boat, tip your head toward the bottom.

Trust the weights in your pockets, your long exhale,

the slow kicking of your finned feet.

Watch for the flash of fins ahead—

divemaster in yellow, your husband

in blue, other divers descending with you.

 

3

Try not to panic when the small French woman

loses air spectacularly, bubbles surrounding

like champagne exploding. Don’t worry when another

fails to equalize, must rise, squeezing his nose. 

Stay calm as you hang in between with the group, 

wait for your guide’s return 

against a wall of silvered fish.

 

4

Remember you have nitrox, giving you 100 feet to sink,

giving you time to reach the bottom. Once you are there,

hold the rocks against surge, bring your breath under control.

Pretend you are resting on your living room couch. Watch

as bull sharks emerge, their wide heads pushing

through the sand you’ve disturbed. Try not to think

of your seal-like body. Forget what you know of the bull shark’s

testosterone, famous in the animal kingdom—

Forget it is mating season. Dismiss the thought of

electroreceptors honed for hunting, sensing

the field of the current, prey, your heartbeat and breath.

Stay still as eight, ten, twelve sharks emerge. Nine feet long,

future mothers all. Notice holes hiding ear stones, 

sensing gravity, depth, every vibration. 

 

5

Rely on your efforts to still your body.

Surrender to surge, rocking you gently.

Release the rock. Stop checking your depth.

The only work left now—to drift and to breathe.

 

 

Patricia Davis-Muffett (she/her) holds an MFA from the University of Minnesota and was a 2020 Julia Darling Poetry Prize finalist, a 2021 finalist in the Muriel Craft Bailey Memorial Award, and won an honorable mention in the 2021 Outermost poetry contest, judged by Marge Piercy. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Atlanta Review, Pretty Owl Poetry, Quartet Journal, Comstock Review and Gyroscope, among others. She lives in Rockville, Maryland, and makes her living in technology marketing.

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