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.

Source: We Don't Know We Don't Know (Graywolf Press, 2010)