TITANIC REVISITED

You won’t find bodies…. You won’t find skeletons…. What anybody who’s explored the wreck finds is pairs of shoes. – James Cameron, discussing 20 more years of research after the movie, Titanic

The camera shows a pair of women’s
shoes, a pair of girls’ shoes, a hand
mirror. A clock, once only thought
to be resting on a cabin mantle,
is now pictured; it was real.
The grand staircase has traveled
in the deep; its oak dense,
but architecture, physics, denser.
The ship remains divided. This we
knew. But study since submits
more lifeboats may not have saved
more souls. With a timely knife,
the filmmaker relays the slow
release of a boat, the wait
before lowering one atop
another. Still, he regrets the frozen
floating faces, knowing ancestors
of them since. He could’ve been
more sensitive. Every pair of shoes —
I think I hear him say. Such
classic shoes: to me they look
like not one night’s but many years’
shoes. The camera closes in once
more. The silted ocean floor balances
one man’s dress shoes, leather
once treated and still preserved
with tannic acid. His bones long ago
turned solution. — That pair of shoes
reached the bottom on a person.

-Laura Scheffler Morgan 12/14-18/17; 3/18-20/18