Nothing could have prepared us
for this.
Nothing anyone could have said
or done
could have prepared us for

this long-haired, fish-tailed lady
engraved in iron
at the bottom of a big pit of dirt
that we’ve been digging by hand
for almost six weeks.

Anyone spying on us
would see three zombies.
We look like the cartoon character Wile E. Coyote
in that long, long minute
after he’s hit by some rocket,
but just before he falls into the canyon, that long, long minute
when he’s still as a stone but knows he’s going
down.

We’ve been digging now for so long
without finding anything
that digging, digging, digging, and not finding
anything
has become normal.

Now that we’ve actually found
something
that looks like the top of a treasure chest,
something
that looks like it might actually be the booty
lost by Captain Kidd
at the
bottom
of the Mullica River
sometime
in the early summer
of 1699,
now that we have actually found that…

what should we do?