Ready to Lose to Salah ad-Din I
By Edward Salem
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.
