So they drowned in the creek, so what.
It’s comical to think something so big can fall prey
to the water, but stranger things have happened:
entire towns with forests and cathedrals wiped clean
from the slate. What I love are the stories of relics
refusing to go with the tide, how in Kazakhstan
the bleached spruce trees jut out of the lake, or the Tuscan town
that keeps emerging time and time after it drowned.
It’s in death you see a thing for what it was: a rarity.
A gift. Locals claim to have seen Cicero waving furiously
from his villa submerged, others give their savings up to hold
a poet’s death mask, Keats against the plaster, his face
still warm from the plague. Did he really have to die for that?
There is a world in which the memory is only the moment,
locked safe behind glass. We could swim there, you know.
Take the day off. Share an iced coffee. Not think of the dead.