L&D

Maybe it’s a medical event
or maybe
it’s the passage you swim 
between this world and the next
 
untether from the land of the living
brush the boundaries of death
sink deep in dark waters 
and then return
with someone to show for it.
 
You tell me: 
did this passage feel routine? 
Or did it feel like dying?
Like a medical event? 
Or like a cataclysm—
quaking with your own tides, 
drowning in your own sea, 
turning inside out before 
you emerged 
gasping and stunned
and new.