Transfer of Power

When the final accident bursts
the balloons of my body,
revealing their water,
my only hope is that a few drops
find Lake Michigan.

I don't want to evaporate from an interdunal pond or
wallow in a Swedish well where an eel wraps itself
around the darkness waiting for a mate.
I'll have my ten years in the lake and then
reincarnate as the blood of a hawthorn.

No true statement can be made except,
"I do not know how to be alone."

Remember that evening in Toronto when
the siren of abandonment
split the night? My blood does.
I was the only one who heard her
because she used your lips.

Sex is somehow still more shocking than violence
in America, but I would rather listen to a waterfall
than hear once more your sacred outrage,
your echoes.

I'm thinking of ice and veins and
the slow work of water beneath the surface.
We're only young once: why create this bruise
of questions on our bodies?
We might have had poppies.

Here I am,
waiting to join the water cycle.