Drownings

            I wrote “Drownings” years ago. Everything in it is true.

 

            Drownings

 

From fifteen feet above myself unbreathing

there on the dock I evaluate those feet,

mine, splayed on the boards I painted.

The camp nurse bends over me to insert

the hard S-tube down my throat. My cool

eyes consider the restless boat,

the waterskies aligned, the tow-rope

a heap. No waves move onto the shale beach.

A benign Lake Champlain accuses me

under a Vermont sun, and I want to disappoint

all these people by dying out from under them

on such a smiling day.

                                       Fifteen years

after my drowning, Jeff chases ducks off

a dock's edge. He sinks beneath the tidal

sheen of Five Mile River. I know he must bob

soon to the surface. I pass my son going up

on my way down.

                               Phillip's drowning

finds him clinging half swallowed beneath a dock

in the Fox River. At dinner in the cottage

I almost too late hear his cries above the voices

of aunts and cousins. I pull my dripping boy

from the suck of the lazy river.

 

In a film a child falls from a high window

bounces to his feet, runs off. We can

do that on our good days: drowning

through a late spring afternoon held

to my desk by a student's whine, or

through the bed my wife avoids

like my eyes, or through a drive

to scare the boys with my braking:

to be saved, emerging into changed air

and light, or to drown down through green

water into a deeper world where we breathe

through our wounds and join all the other

drowned children alive at last.

 

            Not exactly sure where “breathe / through our wounds” came from – except, perhaps, the feeling that it’s our wounds that make us alive, like “all the other / drowned children” with whom we share the wonders of being alive.