A Paper Boat Unfolds

Some months before I drowned

arms crossed like spars

they made the lake

graders, slowly feeding insects

in the dead beast’s well

a skin of mud exuding

in tracks gouged deep as no man’s land

across lawns and paths and roads

as if this growing death

would poison half the world

now trees protrude like grief

from reflections of themselves

in a Rorschach aftermath

the boat skims like a leaf

loosed and unhomed, with that drifting

impermanence of life

of tides and swells in gutters

and rips in stormwater drains

hungry in the way of ghosts

on blue winter days

the rising smoke

of slow evaporation

subsumed and sublimated 

lines grown blurred and weak

in the chrysanthemum of morning

a paper boat unfolds