Cold Seep

We dive for pennies plunked into the deep end
by the adults: copper eyes gleaming orange

or else dull, like brown holes drilled into the painted blue

floor of the public pool.

The black bars of the swim lanes yawn ominously.

We can’t imagine what good they are:

none of us kids can really swim, not laps and strokes and such,

instead flailing and kicking like aquatic cats through the chlorine.

We know we can’t touch those lines, though;

they are trenches of unfathomable depth.

You can get stuck  in them, sucked down into the paint 
like sticky tar.

If a penny lands in one, we gingerly pluck

the winking coin with our ragged nails,

silver blossoms bubbling from our lips.
When no one is looking, I stick my palm flat against 
the smooth black stripe, secretly hoping to get pulled down
into that undersea world. How wonderful it would be 
not to have to breathe, to be able to live forever

down there in the depths, in those black fissures

where there is no sound but a distant knock and burble

of bodies lancing the water from the high dive.

If I could, I would choose to live

like those strange deepwater creatures

who gather around the cracks in the floor 
of the nearly-freezing sea, the Cold Seeps;

the tubeworms and tardibrades, oxygen-shunning extremophiles 
feeding off the bacteria that flourishes 
in the nitrogen that gushes from the dark wounds 
which puncture that pitch black earth. 

Those alien creatures seem so peaceful down there 
in the crushing depths, content to remain 
close to their fathoms-deep food source,
with no need for currency or labor.
But I do not remain stuck, and I've run out of bubbles
and so I reluctantly return to the surface with the others, 
lungs heaving, clutching my sunken treasure and
dismayed at how undeniably delicious and free
the air actually does taste, how nice it really feels
to breathe.