Bathtubs

Sometime I'll think of my sometimes poet friend, Kathleen
who tried to leave him fourteen times and then
wrote herself into a Greek myth scribbled into the tile
above the bathtub
and then
sucked herself down the drain.

Sometime I'll think of the boy I married once
- just once -
though he swore we were perennial siblings reincarnate
when he laid in the bathtub with
a cigarette and Ray Bradbury while
his sister's baby was suffocating in the water bed
all blue and breath-stuck.

Or sometime I'll think of my Self
the Other Self
the One without breasts or worries
wriggling about naked in the bathtub imagining
dolphins and eels and lovely sharks' teeth and Jonah and Gepetto
not wanting to grow up to bleed half to death
and memorize formulas for everything.

Sometime I'll think of Nothing.
There'll be no words or images
no colors or pity or rage or lust or lamentation or last judgment

and none of this will matter anymore
because then I'll be that much closer to Fine.