There was a time when it was nothing but water, and Shelley drowning off the coast of what is now Italy, and Woolf weighing herself down with stones, Dazai and his lover in the rain-swollen Tamagawa Aqueduct, and speaking of love Harry Crosby and Josephine Rotch with same size holes in their temples, a wedding ring on the floor and their friend Archibald Macleish finding the corpses, thinking Crosby drowned in it and of course it being literature and thought I am close to deciding literature is the one thing never to be taken seriously and back in 1929, before Crosby published The Bridge, he met Hart Crane in Paris, who, years later, exclaimed goodbye everyone! with booze on his breath and jumped or fell into the Gulf of Mexico and then Berryman leapt into the Mississippi decades after his father blew a hole in his head outside young Berryman’s window and famously wiped out my childhood and after watching Big Fish, Spalding Gray was reported missing and then dragged out of the East River bloated and blue, and the litany or inventory goes like this: Kerouac drowned in drink and Ginsberg didn’t and Fitzgerald drowned in drink and Hemingway didn’t and Chandler, Capote, O. Henry, and Poe drowned into the night by drink or by causes unknown, and of course there was Pessoa and all the people he wasn’t and Lowry wrote the ravine with dead dog tossed in after.