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Divers
- University of Pittsburgh Press
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44 Divers Dominican Republic In our gear we circled the dying reef— gray pillar and star, algal blooms choking embroidered brain coral come to grief and rubble. Purple sea fans blew beneath domed colonies, silken nets floating. In our gear we circled the sickened reef depleted by carbon sink and bleached by rising temperatures. We spoke in sign, pointed shriveled fingers to griefs incised, grooved, silted over. Angels leached from caverns; we followed remote inlets where a brittle darkness shingling the reef housed a school of blue tang that breached the gloom. A pair of ocean sturgeon smote my mask in the doomed, ultraviolet light of grief that lit wrasse, spotted damselfish, and sweep. When a goatfish jackknifed from the slope I shuddered with hope for the sessile reef— and surfaced with my human griefs. ...