After Christ of the Abyss, a submerged statue by Guido Galletti, off the coast of San Fruttuoso in the Mediterranean Sea
Across the sea, a sculptor
plunges his bronze Christ
down a forgiveness
weighed heavy with barnacle,
tempts me with the mercy
of a place that didn’t already
know you—
where crying is no longer
spectacle but simply
another warm current
across the molten wound
of love. In the left-behind
of my people’s
sacred geology,
zebra mussels scathe
engines and drag
ships
toward rocky bottoms,
taconite uneasy
in the ballast—trapped gas
in the gut of industry.
For a fee, I could
dive toward
my favorite Great Lakes
shipwreck,
witness the salvage
of a vessel
whose seams opened
too quick,
swallowed too much water,
green and even
as our conversation
before your
inevitable disaster,
but it doesn’t take
a tour guide,
fancy goggles,
a historic plaque,
a sonar image or
breathing machine to tell me
this—
in the years after
my father’s overdose
several of the factories
he worked at
caught fire or exploded
and left behind
no charred skeleton,
only a lace of grief
to silver our lungs
heavy hung in the air,
the gray of history sunk
into my body
by my mother’s
cracked fingers
stroking my hair,
trodden sea grass
tangled in the mess
of it all,
and all that’s sailed across.
