after Drowned Women, Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz (Poland) 1921

I mouth a glint of copper
  and misjudge that the metallic taste's a fishhook.

  Insensible in the numb           of ether,

the gulch of anesthesia so cavernous,           I vanish
as if a rat has swallowed half my head.

The sun has fallen to the bottom of the sea.

  I float languid,             in and out.

Absinthe's toxic wormwood greens half my face.

  My fingers web,           and I let them.

A gauntlet of voices elongates like colors in the rain:
  how you imagine   the dead would call to you.

  Blanket-soft drowning
  never expected           as buoyant,

  so comforting,           and yet so cruel:
a swell of whales moaning for each other in the fog.