her son died and the narwhals
wouldn’t talk to her anymore.
Or.
The revolution came and went.
The records of those metal domes
and rusted bolts
and a boy down there in the cold
got mixed up with a hundred thousand other files
doused in kerosene
pluming up into the stars.
That’s okay.
the boy in the black says.
I don’t think the nineties
are going to be a peach either.
We do what we’re here for
and Atlantis is for other men.
Once there was a boy under the sea.
I dove down after him
when I was six, fifteen, twenty-six, thirty-two.
Down into the dark,
a small white eel in the cold muck
and into the lake of my father’s boat
I dove down and saw:
brown bass hushing by
a decade of golf balls
the tip of a harpoon
rusted over, bleeding algae
and a light like 1985
sinking away from me,
dead sons and lost wives