Fathoms

They pressed his stuffed visage
on a microscope slide
under the unseeing ears
of a dandelion blossom radio telescope
parked in the bottom
of the Mariana Trench.
Baseball stitch sutures
pinch his head shut.
His cheeks are swollen with ballast.
They quiver under the weight
of ocean current covers.
In the deep dark
this shrunken headed bathysphere sleeps
on a iron bottom examination table.
They want to take the cuneiform crow hops
stamped on the silted floor of his memory
and tack it to a grand nexus
rising from the ocean floor of his thready pulse
to the ambivalent dust of the salty sky
through the double helix of a waterspout.
There is no unifying theory.
His mind is submerged beyond the sounding line.
The sea has its own agenda
so old that they can never hope to know
what it sings in the far fathoms
that only murmur on the surface
in white noise harmonies
breaking in foam against the barrier reef.
The tempest pours out of wind
in crescendos of grinding stone.
Seaweed strands knit grey shawls in the current
telegraphing the hemispheres of this globe
in scarves of stagnate neurons
hoarse from eons of shouting
out the moment that greets the hour
when the scenery is missing sky
and the facts on the ground just don't add up.
The experiment is a failure
but it won't come any harder
than the quiet that must come.