Written as if it were an official notice posted by a reservoir, the poem starts with a bureaucratic tone and a deeply uncomfortable request: people considering suicide are asked to "drown elsewhere." The joke is cruel on the surface, but it works by imitating the cold language of rules and signs. The speaker quickly steers away from the idea of contamination. What people want from water is "an absence of taste, / not the taste of absence," a line that turns the notice toward grief and the lingering mark a death leaves on a community.
The second stanza pushes the humor further with the request to pay your water bill, then shifts. The neighbors' "reservoirs" start to sound like their own inner lives, and the last image is of a person who once glimpsed themselves in that water, "smaller than life." The mood is darkly comic but sad, and underneath the deadpan voice there seems to be real tenderness, even a plea to notice how small and alone someone can feel.