The Clean Small Song

You go down empty-handed or the telling is a lie. That was the first thing Weha put in me, before the breath work, before the shelves, before she ever let me past the first drop. A teller carries nothing up. Not one shell, not one fish, not the smallest bright thing you fall in love with at nine fathoms and want to keep. You take a reef by leaving it exactly as full as you found it, and you bring the whole of it up in your chest instead, where it can’t weigh anything or be spent. I go down at the grey hour, before the boats. The water is still holding the night’s cool and my ears clear easy, one shelf, two, the light going from white to green to the deep green that isn’t a color so much as a pressure behind the eyes. I don’t pick a way down. That’s the craft nobody outside it believes. You don’t choose. You let the reef hand you the next thing — a gap in the staghorn, a lane of sand, the shadow of the second drop — and you follow whatever it offers, and you never once decide, and you…