1.
Choose your element. The thin tissues of the lungs
can drink it in, soak it up like shredded rag.
Choose your medium: be a drowning artist.
Drown in tempera, drown in porcelain, drown in the roles
or instruments that you play. Do not begin slowly;
that is not the way with drowning. Thought will
freeze you into inaction. Close your eyes, open
your mouth, unconstrict the tube of your throat.
Breathe it in. Drown as a means of coping with life,
or not coping. Drown in time: let days overwhelm you.
Find no compromise between maddening, ruinous action
and inactivity on which you bob and float lifeless.
Breathe it in. Drown in desire. Find those objects
which promise only sustained wanting, and swim
into the sea of them; grab the element hand over hand
barely managing to stay afloat, and still nothing,
beautiful nothing, remains with you. Breathe it in.
Drown in what you have lost. This is easiest.
Let the loss crest around your face, taste its saltiness;
travel down to feel the silt bottom with your palm.
It is Marianna Trench; you have been dead for hours
yet you are still drowning, still traveling down
in darkness toward those creatures who have evolved
without help from the sun. Breathe it in.
Take the image with you into death. Discover heaven
a clear liquid that saturates your lungs with air,
in which desire for immersion may be
sustainably met. Breathe it in; cough it up.
You can drown in sex and love, but those
are child's games. They only distract you
from the elements which flow beneath them
like denser water. You can also drown in yourself.
(This has the advantage of not requiring other people.)

2.
Amniotic fluid is another ocean: landlocked, dark, domed
by living skin as far away as night sky. Suspended
in so much liquid what is there to do but drown?
What does a baby know when the aperture cracks
and a splash far off — its hearing still sonar like the ears
of a whale — indicates that the bathwater is draining,
the ocean is draining: an invasion of light and air.
What does a baby's body know of how to react?
There is knowledge implicit in the flesh. I was there,
in the interface of air and water, and cast my lot
securely with the depth and the darkness, opened
my mouth to drink iin what remained of the draining
fluid. The impetus to drowning kept the baby
in the hospital for four months, a body too small
to live outside a body, lungs drying, warping
like cardboard, hands permanently wrinkled and aged
by the element, and everything too sensitive, too new,
imperfect, crying out for darkness and warmth, salt
and ambergris, even the new skin somehow unready.
This is more than temptation; this has the contours
of a life. Drown in the heat of a summer evening;
drown in the tears of sweat pooling down your neck
onto your shoulders as you think of desires that will
never be met. Cast lots only once, and early,
and spend an entire life sifting through the outcome;
breathe it in. A baby trapped under glass watches
a figure hover against a background of artificial light —
she is too dry, too bright to be its mother —
baby who has made a choice sudden and early
and wonders how it is possible that a sea
can spit you out, like Jonah in the inner ocean
of whale blood, spit out onto hard gravel,
baby who will live many lifetimes, each ended
by drowning, each renewed by impact with the shore.
Death, love, loneliness, fear or time. Don't
be fooled by the element; the element doesn't matter.
Baby who will remember nothing of the plastic
and the glass, of the tubes, who will grow from half
amphibian to full man, who will retain only
a thirst for immersion, a tempation to drowning,
nothing of the incident but the impulse.