Cale Young Rice

Submarine Mountains

Under the sea, which is their sky, they rise
  To watery altitudes as vast as those
  Of far Himàlayan peaks impent in snows
  And veils of cloud and sacred deep repose.
Under the sea, their flowing firmament,
  More dark than any ray of sun can pierce,
  The earthquake thrust them up with mighty tierce
And left them to be seen but by the eyes
Of awed imagination inward bent.

Their vegetation is the viscid ooze,
  Whose mysteries are past belief or thought.
  Creation seems around them devil-wrought,
  Or by some cosmic urgence gone distraught.
Adown their precipices chill and dense
  With the dank midnight creep or crawl or climb
  Such tentacled and eyeless things of slime,
Such monster shapes as tempt us to accuse
Life of a miscreative impotence.

About their peaks the shark, their eagle, floats,
  In the thick azure far beneath the air,
  Or downward sweeps upon what prey may dare
  Set forth from any silent weedy lair.
But one desire on all their slopes is found,
  Desire of food, the awful hunger strife,
  Yet here, it may be, was begun our life
Here all the dreams on which our vision dotes
In unevolved obscurity were bound.

Too strange it is, too terrible! And yet
  It matters not how we were wrought or whence
  Life came to us with all its throb intense
  If in it is a Godly Immanence.
It matters not,--if haply we are more
  Than creatures half-conceived by a blind force
  That sweeps the universe in a chance course:
For only in Unmeaning Might is met
The intolerable thought none can ignore.