Hungry Ghosts

Next time around let me come back as water 

the taste of salt marsh and blue tide on my tongue 

Let my body become an estuary where birds winter over 

the long rise and fall of my lungs filled with wind 

from the Indian ocean 

Let me become an archipelago 

filled with the inward suck and mighty push of liquid 

that softens all things, that undoes man-made knots 

and translates longing into something physical 

Let me be a stream that rushes headfirst to join 

the green body of an ocean seeking communion with sand 

or a snowy egret gliding her long bones at dawn 

over the valley wetlands 

Let me come back as memory in the mudflats

that echo sky and the prints of shy animals

or wings opening in the blue expanse of air so I am lifted

and held by the great nothingness that surrounds us all

Next time around let me come back as water

etched with thunder so autumn trees shake

and scatter their leaves like a hundred canaries

and I am set free in the mouth of some bright yellow storm