On the seat-back monitor in front of me, I
watch the icon of our passenger jet crossing
the North Atlantic on a red-eye from Philly
to Dublin. Names strange and familiar appear
in the blue zone between brown continents:
Gloria Ridge. Charlie Gibbs Fracture Zone.
Porcupine Plain. Great Meteor Tablemount.
Secret landscapes hidden deeper than lunar
knowledge. The map on the tiny flat screen
shows the rises and trenches, canyons crossed
by species no human has seen. Then, every
few minutes, oceanography gives way to the
names of vessels lost in war and storms. Mary
Rose, her guns sent swimming by the French.
Battle-scarred Colossus, run aground. Alabama,
pounded by the Kearsarge, two ships of young
America bloodying each other in the front yard
of Europe. Treasure of the Douro, the glitter
of her diamonds folded into the velvet pockets
of the deep. Titanic’s ice-borne tomb. Lusitania
and Carpathia, torpedoed in war. Thresher’s
last dive to a uranium grave with all hands,
crushed like a tin can, her isotopes sifting like
radioactive pollen into the eyes of Poseidon.
The names mark the losses—dots on a map,
human lives vanished under miles of seawater.
I could run my fingers across the cold Atlantic,
feel the jagged mountain ranges and hot volcanic
faults. I could caress the bones of civilizations
resting in silt finer than moon dust, exoskeletons
of tiny life drifting down like snow through
the lightless silence of ages. I could reach
into the pixels at forty-thousand feet, cradle
them to the surface, bring them home.
Matt Hohner, a Baltimore native, holds an M.F.A. in writing and poetics from Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado. His work has appeared in numerous publications, including Lily, Mom Egg Review, Truck, The Moth, The Irish Times, and Free State Review. Hohner’s poems recently took third and first place in the 2015 Maryland Writers’ Association Poetry Prize.