Illustrations and text for my poem 'A Good Drowning'. With thanks to artists Gilberto De Martino, Hilary French, Jon Munson II, Tim Shelbourne, and all at Poems Please Me. 

Full ebook at www.poemsplease.me/red

And the poem itself:

A GOOD DROWNING
(By the River Aniene, June 2015)

It calls you in,

bottleglass green and cool in summer heat,

but the current’s too strong:

before you know, you’d be floating unhurriedly

into the Tiber, forty miles downstream.

Not such a bad way to drown, taking it easy,

having everything you’ve experienced

click through your head like a slow movie reel. With time

for sight-seeing – think – those twenty-seven centuries

from the founding of the city,

the emperors and the excesses,

popes, palaces and pleasure-gardens,

amphitheatres and aqueducts,

temples and trumphs, legions, lingua Latina…

so much more than one’s own meagre existence,

a hundred generations roughly speaking,

surely enough to fit a million lives.

It seems almost a pity

to miss that.

I think I’ll dip my toe in now.