Lament of Submerged Persons

^{Mudslide in Rio de Janeiro state...: in the early hours of Saturday, following two days of heavy downpour. A boulder slid down a slope and hit a group of houses in the city of Niterói. Volunteers joined rescuers in silence so that any survivors could be heard.
                       —BBC News, November 11, 2018}

It's as if the marrow of the earth mistook us
for part of itself, our limbs its own settling

form, like we have sunk into chairs and taken as us
our tight-tucked legs, our bellies. Or known the settling

head of our daughter to sternum as an uncleaved us,
one sleeping self inside a woken self. The settling

mud around, its heave, seems simple now: is softening us
into dense dark shape, and we are settling

our gauges too: voice from volume, sediment, shadow, us
from the spaces we lived. Silence settling

who we thought we were, was us,
into this all-consuming lack. Nothing settling

a choke around the circumference of light, drawing us
in. We no longer know if our eyes are open, only settling:

(where our daughter sank her pillow—her hair—and us
somewhere too), though we're yielding there to this, settling

aphotic loss, how we once lived what we could bear: us,
her, no more. Now there is weight so true, a settling

so whole, we could die in its lightness: it exiles us
to formless terror—no blanket, no bed, but settling.

If we could remember that once a throat was us
inside a body. Only: here, or here, inside this settling,

a hint of shade, almost like memory: the sound of us. 
If we could just know again our mouths. We 

could part the earth with our voices, ask to be heard.