Everyone Who Is Dead

The audience saw the boy in the distance

discussing what they did not know,

as if entering into the boat at his feet

might take him somewhere soft, a ladle

of milk cooling into an empty glass,

a cloth carrying lakewater off of an oar

to be wrung back into the dark

body of the lake beneath the boat

and the boy inside it, the oarsman

drawing his arms back over the dark

sound of the water and its seam under

the sky sewn through the evening

light, which seems rising, though not quite.