Vessel
By Robert Pinsky

What is this body as I fall asleep again?
What I pretended it was when I was small—

A crowded vessel, a starship or submarine
Dark in its dark element, a breathing hull,

Amrs at the flanks, the engine heart and brain
Pulsing, feet pointed like a diver’s, the whole

Resolutely diving through the oblivion
Of night with living cargo.  O carrier shell

That keeps your trusting passengers from All:
Some twenty thousand times now you have gone

Out into blackness tireless as a seal,
Blind always as a log, but plunging on

Across the reefs or coral that scrape the keel—
O veteran immersed from toe to crown,

Buoy the population of the soul
Toward their destination before they drown.