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Poetry

Lost Sea Adventure

Penny Boxall

Craighead Caverns, Tennessee

The cave is ages deep. A wisecrack tourguide
leads us through the antechambers, full of silence

and, when he cuts the power, the sort of darkness
that sends you quickly blind. Stalactites’ untimely

growth shivers to solidity, and Civil War graffiti
still proclaims who loves whom best, sometimes

with explanatory diagrams. Concrete smooths
transition past redundant stills and broken barrels

falling apart like petals. Then we hit the lake –
large as a cathedral and uplit with unsettling submerged

spotlights – and the promised boats. The outboard
evokes strimmers. Glib pallid shapes reveal themselves

occasionally in the salt-blue water. Not indigenous,
the guide explains, but introduced to puzzle

a way out, and there isn’t one. And look what the dark
has managed – the ordinary trout sightless and infertile

after months. We have to replenish twice a year,
he says, and tips them dogfood. Through the smeared

glass bottom of the boat we can’t distinguish anything.

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