Derelict

Bone becomes stone. Here where the sun neither rises nor sets; beyond where light will not reach, where gravity gives way to pressure. Creatures of the deep slide through darkness with grotesque elegance, with their own blind beauty. Eyeless, some cast a futile glow on sterile grit, a circle of radiance into which particles of death slowly fall. The only motion here is downward.

Somewhere far above, in the chasms of the ocean, there is point of no return. It bears no name. Everything born in air and water, everything inanimate or once alive, in time, finds its way to reach it. Only their bones drift past, and flesh, dust, everything, from mountain to shore, from river to sea, goes on down to seabed sleep.

Life’s brittle pieces break off. Rains and rivers wash the continents clean of them till, one by one, these specks and fragments become lifeless dust stirred in eddies by the tide. Grain by grain, a world of sediment flows down the seamounts, rising and falling like clouds in the spiral currents. 

Abraded land and the failing flesh it carries heaps itself so slowly on the sea-plains below. All things lost, all things afloat, discarded, wallow in the waves to drown at the last, beyond remembering. On the ocean floor, the stuff of nature and the works of man together, lose all shape, grinding to nothing in pitiless darkness. In the dark abyss, where sluggish bodies of chilling water cannot even freeze, pressure crushes what is left. Everything is derelict. There is no redemption, no recovery here.

© BH 2012

---

For your information, Lagan refers to what is lost at sea but still capable of being recovered. Derelict is that which is beyond salvage. Jetsam is that which is thrown into the sea and Flotsam the floating remains of circumstance, of wreck and ruin. All consigned, I suppose, to the deep.