From here, it’s two hundred miles to any lake
that isn’t a hole somebody dug.
Scraped shallows that we flood, their silting-
up inevitable and ignored
as the cicadas’ mechanical burr from the woods.
My lip still cut from her teeth.
In a sea we pay no attention to
someone is drowning.
I say someone since the truth—
dozens, hundreds a day—
takes so much longer. At the baseball game,
they take a moment
for the player who’d drowned in the quarry
two days before. All their
small black flags cinched at half-staff. Coaches
hugging for a walk-off double
and the silence always something
we take. They lost
by double digits on national TV. I meant this
as a love poem for the boy
who reached the other, his friend, and had
to turn back. Who waited
on shore, salt-faced, staring. And knew someone
would come that way for him.
