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islet’s museum there is a twisted
    wine-bottle, crusted with fool’s gold from the iron-
    cold depth below the redoubt. It has been listed
    variously by experts: one, that a galleon
    blown by a hurricane out of Cartagena,
    this far east, had bled a trail of gold bullion
    and wine from its hold (a view held by many a
    diver lowering himself); the other was nonsense
    and far too simple: that the gold-crusted bottle
    came from a flagship in the Battle of the Saints,
    but the glass was so crusted it was hard to tell.
    Still, the myth widened its rings every century:
    that the Ville de Paris sank there, not a galleon
    crammed with imperial coin, and for her sentry,
    an octopus-cyclops, its one eye like the moon.
    Deep as a diver’s faith but never discovered,
    their trust in the relic converted the village,
    who came to believe that circling frigates hovered
    over the relic, that gulls attacked them in rage.
    They kept their faith when the experts’ ended in doubt.
    The galleon’s shadow rode over the ruled page
    where Achille, rough weather coming, counted his debt
    by the wick of his kerosene lamp; the dark ship
    divided his dreams, while the moon’s octopus eye
    climbed from the palms that lifted their tentacles’ shape.
    It glared like a shilling. Everything was money.
    Money will change her, he thought. Is this bad living
    that make her come wicked. He had mocked the belief
    in a wrecked ship out there. Now he began diving
    in a small shallop beyond the line of the reef,
    with spear-gun and lobster-pot. He had to make sure
    no sail would surprise him, feathering the oars back
    without clicking the oarlocks. He fed the anchor
    carefully overside. He tied the cinder-block
    to one heel with a slip-knot for faster descent,
    then slipped the waterproof bag around his shoulders
    for a money-pouch. She go get every red cent,
    he swore, crossing himself as he dived. Wedged in boulders
    down there was salvation and change. The concrete, tied
    to his heel, pulled him down faster than a lead-
    weighted, canvas-bound carcass, the stone heart inside
    his chest added its poundage. What if love was dead
    inside her already? What good lay in pouring
    silver coins on a belly that had warmed him once?
    This weighed him down even more, so he kept falling
    for fathoms towards his fortune: moidores, doubloons,
    while the slow-curling fingers of weeds kept calling;
    he felt the cold of the drowned entering his loins.
    II
    Why was he down here, from their coral palaces,
    pope-headed turtles asked him, waving their paddles
    crusted with rings, nudged by curious porpoises
    with black friendly skins. Why? asked the glass sea-horses,
    curling like questions. What on earth had he come for,
    when he had a good life up there? The sea-mosses
    shook their beards angrily, like submarine cedars,
    while he trod the dark water. Wasn’t love worth more
    than the coins of light pouring from the galleon’s doors?
    In the corals’ bone kingdom his skin calcifies.
    In that wavering garden huge fans on hinges
    swayed, while fingers of seaweed pocketed the eyes
    of coins with the profiles of Iberian kings;
    here the sea-floor was mud, not corrugating sand
    that showed you its ribs; here, the mutating fishes
    had goggling eye-bulbs; in that world without sound,
    they sucked the white coral, draining it like leeches,
    and what looked like boulders sprung the pincers of crabs.
    This was not a world meant for the living, he thought.
    The dead didn’t need money, like him, but perhaps
    they hated surrendering things their hands had brought.
    The shreds of the ocean’s floor passed him from corpses
    that had perished in the crossing, their hair like weeds,
    their bones were long coral fingers, bubbles of eyes
    watched him, a brain-coral gurgled their words,
    and every bubble englobed a biography,
    no less than the wine-bottle’s mouth, but for Achille,
    treading the mulch floor of the Caribbean Sea,
    no coins were enough to repay its deep evil.
    The ransom of