Rest. We wake and sleep by the natural light cycle, like you

once did. No use for eyelid, our dreamlife one of simple

drift from this glass world to another. How convenient

that light behaves like a wave—the ease of taking

into dreamwaters what we know from waking life—brilliant glow

of phosphorescence in red, yellow, green, slip of scene,

sweet scrim draped like a tail across the familiar. Our night

a superior peace, grace of story. I can tell what you were thinking—

that we watched a dreamfilm in black and white.

Sorry unfinned beast, committed as you are

to the spectrum of visible light, imagine for a moment

orgasmic chromatics, stage set in ultraviolet. Every organism

is schooled before birth in the stuff of stimuli, perhaps that’s why

you’re surprised at our capacity for belief, the way it rides a riverbed

beyond beauty, how we too can be fooled by illusions

of sight, things we thought would feed us but instead left us

gutted. Why else would we qualify as counsel unless we knew

what it was to be flawed, to make a choice then withdraw,

or become a martyr for a larger cause? Disappointed

it’s not instinct alone that churns our senses? Listen,

you’ve had a hard day, jostled in the shoal. Rest

from who you think you are. Find a cave, rock overhang. Sleep. Desire relaxed

is pleasure. Pelvic fin twitches like a heart-beat, keeps steady. Now,

look out to your cloud-marked sky, find a slit like a gill and breathe.