What We Know of Death by Drowning

1. Josef Mengele Drowns While Swimming at a Beach in Brazil, 1979

His name then: Wolfgang Gerhard.
How easy, slipping on another man’s
skin. Another country, too,

its sun’s heat and light
as insistent as a pair
of forceps.

His pants, left crumpled
on the beach, forged papers
and a few hard candies in the pocket.

Where the water
was shallow, he could look
down and see

his shadow passing over
the pale sand, a wobbly twin,

matching him
stroke for stroke for stroke.

2. Li Po Drowns Trying to Embrace the Reflection of the Moon in the Yangtze, 762

The moon is no drinker of wine, so I must
compensate. Surely you’ve heard

the crows and nightingales
egging me on? The day has dispersed
from the courtyards like a gang
of sparrows, and nothing

is left of the world that is not
pecked-over, hard and dark
as the dream of an apple seed.

The young men laugh
at an old man drinking
alone, but here

are my companions:
my shadow, as loyal
and thin as a starved dog,

and the moon, his whole face
wrinkling with laughter.

3. Bob, the Circus Seal, Drowns Himself in His Tank in Galveston, 1911

By then his teeth had rotted out,
and he often turned to his owner
with his mouth open as if about

to speak, a ruined smell
jetting from inside.

He had already attempted it,

three days before,
but his owner dove in and pulled him up
onto the slimy planks. His circus show days

were long gone. Sure, some afternoons
a kid might walk by
and see the scabby painting

on the side of the building: the hoop,
the pedestal, the ghost
of a man in a top hat,

the striped ball now like a clot
of pus streaked
with blood, hovering

over the sleek, dark head.

4. Natalie Wood Drowns under Mysterious Circumstances near Santa Catalina Island, 1981

Let me tell you: death
is a long silk glove
dropped to the floor.

It doesn’t remember the heft
of the arm, the fingers
dancing.

That limb is gone, and nothing
will hold its shape again.

You twirl your pastel skirt. You watch
two cars
race toward the cliff,
and there is nothing

you can do. So many lives
you’ve entered
like a room: swooned,

held the prop pistol
to your own face, sang
for the back row.
But was it your voice?

What was that name
you were born into?
Natalia Nikolaevna Zakharenko?
What happened to her?

Was she the one
taken, her family butchered, living
another life
among the enemy people?

Was it the morning?
when she stopped scanning
the horizon for rescuers
that she turned into you?

5. Hippasus of Metapontum Is Drowned at Sea for the Heresy of Discovering Irrational Numbers, ca. 500 BCE

His fellow Pythagoreans had already built
a shrine to his memory
and placed it where

he passed by every day, but he did not take
the hint. It was on the ship
that they seized him.

God was an integer, firm
as an unripe apricot.
But weren’t there streets
in the city that wound forever
into the minute darkness?

Weren’t there dreams where he met
himself again and again,
without ever seeming to wake?

The sea is incommensurable.
Each lungful of air
kept dividing itself, even as the boat

became a decimal point on the far horizon.

6. Bennie Wint, 20 Years after Faking His Drowning Death, is Discovered Alive, 2009

In the first years after I disappeared, I read
every report of drowning: children,

mostly boys,
mostly in their bathtubs,
mostly accidents.

Old men whose lungs filled with fluid
while they sat in their armchairs.

Fishermen. Swimmers. Immigrants
crowded onto rafts. Some men,
their throats seize up,
and they die without

ever swallowing a drop,
as if they never left the shore.

Some nights I dreamed
what never happened: I held my drowning

in my palm like a giant pearl.
Some days, standing behind
the cash register of my new life,

I felt my lungs flatten out like a pair
of discarded socks. Did I ever think

of the woman I left on the shore
as I kicked out
past the last of the breakers?

I won’t say.
Here it was: I might have drowned
trying to pretend to. I had to swim
so far out, then mark

a different beach
and swim back

a different man, without knowing
if his strength was enough
to carry me to shore.