Most of us have never looked into the eye of a whirlpool. Most of us don't know what the man at the back of the bus knows, that there is more green and purple there than blue, and more black than either of those. Most of us have no idea that the air inside is calm, dead calm, colder than a dead man's hands, and so wet that each breath coats the lungs with condensation and makes the weatherbeaten man in the torn grey coat feel like he is already fallen into the abyss.

He is a sea-poet now, he tells me. He writes about the cannibal mother who took his arm like a sacrifice. He still loves her, he says, washed-out blue eyes collecting little replica oceans barely held in by dense near-blond lower lashes. I think, at first, that he loves her like the adult children of drugged-out mothers love the blue-cloaked, hand-clasping Madonna they set up instead. But he says he loves her for her book-throwing, boat-breaking rages, for the way a calm felt wrong, for her coy promises of bottomless mysteries unreachable to a rusty fishing-boat and a tiny ragged figure mending net after net.

I can't help but personify his sea-goddess. I can't help but picture a blue-grey swirling woman with dark eyes and tangled kelpy hair. I can't help but see the creaking boat in my mind's eye as becalmed on a smooth, unlined palm or crushed between a water-wrinkled thumb and forefinger. But I know he sees her the way she is: vaster than memory, deeper than song, as unknowable as the Sun. She isn't ours, he says, and she isn't like us. I believe him, but I don't understand. I tell him so, and he looks away. Reflected in the window of the bus, he sees an incomprehensible realm where all the colors are cool and human flesh does not belong. I only see him. I don't understand that there exist things I can't understand. I have never looked into the eye of a whirlpool.