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Exhibit A: Temptation
They look so harmless from the air --
Mere shadows limning the islands
With a dimple rock here and there
Breaking waves and hypnotizing ships.
Here at the tip of Jewell Island
You can see the large embankment,
The menace of shadows that suddenly drops off
Like a spool unrolling into fathoms.
A swimmer died there once,
Paddling from the mainland in a yellow kayak
One festive autumn day
When the wind was low and the colors too high.
He saw the miniature cliffs and caves of danger
But couldn't resist the seduction
Of lapping waves encrusted
With frigid diamonds in October heat.
Take her to your darkest place.
Hold her against the wall of midnight.
Press dagger stars against her eyes
Until all she sees is night.
Exhibit B: Inhabitance
Her body is not her own, you know.
Sometimes inhabited by ghosts,
Sometimes driven to run dark streets,
Pound out the stones.
She wants to take the lost children
And lead them to an impossible prayer.
She is the unknown factor
In a brilliant equation that leads to despair.
Down deep past her islands lies the junk heap.
She can't rid the garden of microscopes.
She's versatile but overly obsessed
With her bed of jewels and daggers.
Her hair flows in syncopation
With the currents
Of a sacrificial tide
Far beyond failure or commerce.
She has no rights
Though her depths can be deceptive.
Mute, blind and bound, she stubbornly
Refuses to yield her dark secret.
Exhibit C: Addiction
As for him, he's the one
They have all stepped through --
Hes the diver of fortune, of
Days spent craving and leafing.
He carries an exquisite silver mallet
For excavating samples:
Days spent tap tap tapping
Between gem-encrusted toes.
When he examines his trove under the troubled
Light of the moon the samples shine.
When he takes them out in the daylight
They cry and glitter like small orphans
Born at sunrise,
Abandoned by noon.
Persistent to the core he peels
On his suit and descends again.
Addictions grow out of the desire to stop time,
To enter the land beyond corpses. He is consumed by
The hunt for the elusive portals behind the
Submerged flesh of the dream.
Exhibit D: Interdiction
Why stop at tomorrow?
Why not make it beg and crawl?
Down there life is backwards: magnified
Versions of your own distended delusions.
Music leads to madness. Enter it
Here, wave good-bye to what
You assumed was true. (Warning Sign One: the Submerged
Lands are part of a highly irrational myth.)
Swaying in the wind, writing
In the water. Soon he will climb
Backwards through peaks and ravines
To locate a sunken treasure,
Measure the life-thread inviolably
Connected to this dowry of stone.
Lives that have become food, fashion and medicine
Crown this inverted world.
Cathedrals made of bone
Encircle her throne;
Girdles of sea glass
Cannot be unwoven.
Exhibit E: Abandoned Shipwrecks
Included in the range of resources are
Certain abandoned shipwrecks
Which have been deserted
And to which the owner
Has relinquished ownership rights
With no retention.
The term embedded
Means firmly affixed
In the submerged lands or in
Coralline formations such that the
Use of tools of excavation
Is required in order to move
The bottom sediments to gain
Access to the shipwreck, its cargo,
And any part thereof;
(But the sea is not easily declassified.)
She vows to dangle in the music of flux
Hung upside down between trees
And stars, her card spitting fortunes,
Her sextant spinning in all directions.
Exhibit F: Tourism
The lands beneath navigable waters
As defined in section 1301 of the
Submerged Lands Act offer
Recreation and education,
Tourism, biological resources,
Any excuse for historical research --
The idea of irreplaceable shipwrecks
Has lured his pirate soul.
Surely the scope note will tell him
When to stop and where the steep descent
To the sea-bottom begins. Compensation
must be made for lost sanctuaries, resources
Such as any living or nonliving
Resource, be it recreational,
Ecological, historical or aesthetic.
(All change must be catalogued.)
The boundaries have grown murky.
He has been searching for days for the shadowy hulk
Formerly known as Destiny. He has begun to
Think of Her as an underwater amusement park.
Exhibit G: Illusive Stilts
Meandering in the surveying
Of submerged lands he maps the
Sediment textures, geochemical
Elements and macroinvertebrates
Of the bays, estuaries, lagoons,
The inner continental shelf
That constitutes her body.
Still, he cannot hold her circumference.
High-resolution seismic profiles
And cores were used to investigate
The geologic framework and sequence
Stratigraphy of late Quaternary
Coastal plain and shelf-margin deltas.
But the city beneath his hands
Continues to elude him, sliding
Effortlessly into silt.
On illusive stilts
He pushes the weight of many men.
Completely convinced that he
Alone will be able to find her nave.
Exhibit H: The Aching City
All the clocks are underwater now.
Time has been stopped in its tracks,
Appearing frozen and skeletal beneath
The fragile, high-powered scopes.
Yet the aching city under the waves
Continues to inhale secrets
And exhale lies through its many
Doors. The diver has begun to
Explore the windows of his
Body in a deluded attempt to come closer
To her guises, in order to feel
The ocean of her shape.
He begins to remember
The submerged world of mirrors,
Pools, windows and spoons
That his childhood left behind.
Frantically he scrapes
Samples into jars and flashes
Underwater cameras into her
Encrusted, embedded eyes.
Exhibit I: Excavation
Using tools of painful precision
He excavates the loss,
Measuring the decline of the
City of Roses.
Where once her heart was cradled deep,
These reefs consist of spaghetti-like,
Tubular hard calcium deposits
Left by generations of filter-feeding worms.
How can this be true? The narrow distance
Between his longing and her sacristy
Is growing more suffocating, dreadful and cold.
Come forth, beauty, he prays.
He traces the lines of her spine
Tenderly as an exhausted lover,
Subsumed by fractals and traces
Of the tiny animals embalmed in her mind.
Sunshine doesnt exist down there.
Like a bird climbing a trellis of air
He betrays her historic face,
Bubbling up facts to an eager, misanthropic team.
Exhibit J: Lost and Found
He was lost from the beginning.
It seems obvious now. Leaning
Into old pictures one can clearly discern
A perilous sense of abandonment.
But what of her?
Will she always lurk
Somewhere in his fathoms?
Is she evil or its absence?
Perhaps she was just some
Legendary phantom,
A tale richly embroidered by
Bored sailors in the jetsam.
When he retired from the trade
He took his kayak to the ocean,
Wishing only to drift on the surface
Of her logical, inexplicable tides.
Has her lovely clavicle
Been shattered by off-shore tremors,
And have her strange thighs
Been stroked by illiterate strangers. . .
Exhibit K: Portfolio
Her hatred of clocks
Was widely known.
He heard it from the herbivores
Of the reef community.
Her kingdom was so rich,
So invisible for so long.
Now they have televised every
Corner of her poisoned mouth
He exclaims in the hotel room,
Remembering limpets and periwinkles,
The way she carefully dressed herself
In sponges, barnacles and hydroids.
Perhaps I never knew her at all
He muses, having drunk too deeply
Of stars and sheepshead. Perhaps it
Wasn't a particular dredge that killed her. . .
Perhaps she isn't even dead, even now
Twists in terrible oyster reefs,
Spitting pollen into the black tundra
Of my fear.
Exhibit L: Extraction
What destroyed him was the reversal
Of roles. Carefully as a dentist
He used long probes to extract her
Slender memories:
The city bathed in gold,
Roses on the ledge,
The leap beyond terror
From which certain species
Never recover. I have
Traveled a cold mountain without
Hope, traversed a desert without water,
Only to run across
Hot coals of desire, barefoot and
Unarmed, bound
Up within her fear, feeling at last
What she felt -- my knife edge on
The horizon of her soul,
Finally hearing her
As if listening for the first time
To the marvelous secrets.
Exhibit M: Oblivion
She forgave what she could no longer feel.
It is he who has been blinded
From root to crown. He finally learned
Too much about desire.
She has been corrupted. My
Pockets are filled with her memories
But they are all in pieces! Broken, beyond
Repair. But how I loved her carcass!
He explains it feebly to me (towards
The end). How I wanted to feel her peace!
Destruction did not happen in my
Lifetime, he argues, knee-deep.
How I wanted to guide her home, like you,
Like a therapist -- to make her (impossibly)
Confront herself and see -- but all I saw (he confesses)
Was a sheer and brutal declivity.
They shone back at me from the eyes of
Lined seahorses (Hippocampus erectus).
She ravished me and shook my hold on the world.
I died in her eternity and she became me.
Exhibit N: Recovery
The richest
Colors are fading fast.
The tiny hearts explode
In valleys of mud.
I guess I needed too much.
Should have been satisfied with the delirium
Of sun and air. That one delicious
Moment of sin was accidental, I swear.
But I chose to go under,
I chose to look for what
May or may not have been there.
I chose to follow her to the edge.
The end is here: now: never: forever:
Take my hand. It will feel
Like silk. Inhabit my memories when you descend
Into the next new world.
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