Ready to Lose to Salah ad-Din I

Across the suffocating blackness, the waveless water

and a broad hush in the indecipherable wind,

Jordan’s hills were obscured by the night.

Sitting on the clumpy sand, I convinced myself

I could make out a few hills like bloated storm clouds,

a voidal  Jordan on a horizon that evoked endlessness

or eternity, or whatever it was I had once heard large

bodies of  water evoked. The half-moon shone

like the yin-yang Palestine-Israel. A bisected orb,

one half  black, the other  white, both shaped like

heads of sperm. They were cuddling or

sixty-nineing, clinging together like puzzle pieces

in a detail of an MC Escher mezzotint.

My ideas made no sense. I was tired, and it was easier

to wade into the sea and let the saltwater carry me

where it would. Water got in my ears and sounded

as loud in my head as waves crashing against a cliff  wall.

I worried a military jeep would swoop in, its whirling

orange roof  light spinning goofily like a clown car

trying to be serious, stabbing the air with Hebrew.

Or a drone might fart down out of nowhere

to snatch me in its beak like a predatory bird

plucking a seafood dinner. So be it. Nothing lived

in the Dead Sea. That was the whole point.