But why not be this lake instead,
icy blue, and the little white curls
of waves, its absolute refusal
to be human? Why not be a thing?

Why not be a place
you’d go to get away
from your mother’s frontal lobe “eroding”
as the faxed medical report has it?

Why not a lovely blue-turning-green
and why not the removal of all feeling?

Maybe she’d rather you be a lake,
a way to lie still in the world,
a melted-down pool of snow,
a place to rest.

You could let yourself wash up on foreign shores.
Or be the surface across which boats might ply their trade,
taking humans from the one shore in sun
to the other side in shade.

You remember humans, don’t you?
The ones who row the boat,
who act for all the world
as if they know where they are going?