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.
You took spent shotgun shells down / from the shelf, filled them to the lip / with blent black powder, hot-glued / fuses into their mouths to shut them up.