Indar.
First the technical reality. The rebreather kit is a real thing. A bit of 'technical diving' kit in which a filter scrubs the carbon dioxide from the recirculated air. The human lung is apparently very wasteful of oxygen during normal breathing and only uses a portion of it. Most of it is expelled again.
Re-breathers are used by Special Forces for jobs where escaping bubbles would give them away. Some sports divers use it too, such as underwater photographers who want to avoid silvery bubbles in their shots. I'm told it is
very unforgiving of those who don't know what they're doing.
If you google
Draeger Re-Breather you'll find more than enough to satisfy basic curiosity
.
If you follow this Wikki link it 'dives' into the subject in great depth and can both fascinate
and horrify.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebreathe ... rld_War_II
If
Colm sees this and has ever used one perhaps he could tell us how it
feels compared to breathing from a traditional Scuba tank on your back.
=====
Now for the poem.
It's a mixture of things. Firstly, it
was a genuine dream which woke me. A typical - I assume - writer's dream in which I was present as an observer, watching the girl swimming slowly across the seabed, half hidden in the seaweed. The distortions etc are what you see when looking into relatively clear water from just above the surface. More on this later.
One of my fictional characters, Frances, who I write about in prose, is a diver. Like a fish in water, perfectly at home there, unlike her distinctly non-swimming husband. I've given her a sports re-breather, but she has yet to use it in a story. Maybe she's dropping me a hint that they want another adventure
The 'predator' element probably came from a short story I wrote where Frances 'dealt with' an aqualung salmon poacher. If anyone
really wants to see this short drop me an email, or PM with 'Frances Short' as a subject line and I'll send you a copy.)
Why a redhead? Frances isn't. Maybe my red-headed Muse was trying to get in on the act? My head gets a bit crowded at times. And those rippling sea-urchins can look very red under some light conditions
The other possible 'input' and the drowning Ophelia factor. (This also deals with the distortions) About forty years ago at St Ives in Cornwall I was looking down into a small inlet near the harbour. It was a bright sunny day. The water was very clear and the beds of weed, over a stony bottom, were slowly pulsing in and out in time with the waves. Positively mesmeric
To my horror I saw a body, just above the seabed, face down, arms and legs in blue overalls waving in time with the waves. With a fan of long hair moving likewise.
Within a few seconds I realised it wasn't a genuine corpse, but a discarded or lost boiler-suit, filling and folding in the currents. The head, which was anchoring it in place, was a rock which had presumably snagged it at some point, and also hosted a fine collection of that stringy bootlace type weed, undulating.
I moved around and studied it from several angle to convince myself it really was a trick of the light and tide and felt the warmth returning to the day. The initial impression was horrible.
But
how this all came together in a strangely unsettling dream is something only the inner workings of a writer's mind could explain.
Gyppo