Broken in the Depths

 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.