To break with
the rules and to use these
materials,
despite all warning;
to reverse Noah, to
submerge and not to
float away from disaster,
but to view death as if
preserved in ice--
a specimen removed from the
current threat--
disrupted the pact between
us and the deep.
The intent to view death
through a porthole,
fulfilled faster than eyeblink,
as death rushed in, mercifully
faster than understanding could or
last regrets.
We who lived with their
indeterminacy,
the Schrodinger's sub,
imagined horrors within horror
worse than life itself.
The lungs of acid, brains of fire,
hallucinations of sirens,
Titanic ghosts,
kamis with mouths like lampreys,
shimmering things with seaweed
in their claws,
to depict an underworld with
laws not like ours.
We imagined last conversations
with one another and with a Maker
who understood and did not
forgive and doesn't,
silent as the water still and deep around them.
And yet the water came in
waves like blades in the pressurized depths,
crueler than any human cut-
cleaner overall.
Tragedy holds no thrall for me,
I leave them here and for all time
the guests of the sea.
Neither deserving nor undeserving,
just unfortunate and fateful,
unheeding of warnings,
the victims of the depths of curiosity
and the heights of hubris,
Icarus in his fall,
to something lower than the land
is all.
