The divers in wetsuits dipping their masked
faces, testing the turbid waters; the divers who,
unfazed by small
fry
like the local
snakes and alligators, must now wait for special-
"lighter and tougher"-wet suits to protect their skin and lungs
from heat and other toxins, like jet gas.
But a swiftly moving lightning storm prohibits the dive.
As if lightning, which Heracli tus praised for being
the lord of all, would waste time on a wreck!
Newscaster: "I've experienced turbulence even on commercial airlines."
As if life were a walk across a field and lightning
would refrain from striking a metallic object with a better logo.
And the brutal heat, presaging thunder, must be nothing less than
"the worst in history" for this precise day in May,
and what CNN announcer can spare air time to mention
the fish who stayed alive in their tanks after a five-or was it ten?–
hour power outage in a pet aquarium in Miami.
And "what if" I am dehydrated and two of my closest friends
should call from different time zones to say they've been
doubled over with pain from kidney stones, saying "men
have no idea how much water they should really drink."
Time manages to pass despite these crises
and divers have sighted the crate believed to be the empty
wreckage and wander through muck to unearth
(-would dislodge be the more accurate word-?)
the black box buried in the silt; divers who have
"no doubt that the box," impervious to ruin, is not
in
the bottomless "sinkhole" and sure "if it's in water
it's salvageable," and will tell the public all it has to know
about the death of the unretrievable dead.
