Say Me in Dashes

Here's one more poem I love from Lance Larsen's Backyard Alchemy:

Say Me in Dashes

The inlet you swim shelters a flotilla of ducks whose beaded
heads beg you to count them. The stippled field burned

across one corner brings back your wrongs, etc. Or mine.
Listen, I have used second person to camouflage my fear

of scrubbed light, of sky reaching down to collar me
like a riled border agent checking tourists for forged papers.

Just now, I'm doing backstroke, but if I let myself rise
from the grave of first person, I might also glide like a snapping

turtle deciding which toe of this sorry swimmer to bite.
Or a sentence in a Victorian novel fallen against the belly

of a pregnant dreamer on shore, turning now to devour
a delicious direct object. Why is it, whatever I look

at turns hungry? When Christ multiplied the loaves,
he committed as many catastrophes of meaning as there were

open mouths. What the multitude gave back filled
twelve baskets. What they refused filled seven horizons.

I'm no different, crawling atop what is vertiginous and wet
and holy and calling it water. Occupying a floating city

wrapped in skin but calling it body. Say me in dashes, lift
me till I rise out of waiting the way rain drizzles down.