Learning to Swim Again, in Secret

Learning to Swim Again, in Secret

“Why, if it was an illusion, not praise the catastrophe, whatever it was, that destroyed illusion and put truth in it's place?” 
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own

Later it will be as she’s some pilgrim and not feel it for anything but high alders,

and a trail all her own to break.  Her lungs and concession at least.

And because what’s there yields now to water, her absolute vault of silence

has flown: into suits into shoes packed into stowed into remains and those names

all their precious names whispered in tissue with the dried lilies and sweet

peas, creased the way she saw  later, much later, an origami crane the one brother may

have brought back from the war because he remembers his brother

liked birds, even that cussed gull, whose tulle smooth face and sometimes,

depending on the light, lavender breast that instigated awe.  Really it’s because she wants  

the buttermilk quench of that astringent lake bottom.  To call up such sting she tips

over her own shadow to pinch it in her diaphragm, float it in her throat, her esophagus.

And because it’s the way of all waves in wind, its impulsive brusque is the cut

of air, a bird at swim in all that blue nauseous blue air.  

Teach me to sink she’d plead, and stay sunk.   Teach me

to be this whistling loon, or that glassy seal slunk under, make me be the shutter 

of their ink pot red or black bottomless gloss eye.

To stay on bottom longer and longer.  It’s ok I’m not a boy please,

you never have to tell Mama—

Because before it was only gulls and seals and boys swimming was let to. 

Only ever modest shore.  And until now ever only a slip cling whip 

of panic beneath it all

when that boat tipped.  Yes a slip through that cling, into all that water.  Look

how quick we all go from calm to confusion,

the way some birds drift and float and from absolutely nowhere fleece

the small songbirds who, seized by a prey’s anxiety, are all instinct, all empty

breast nest blown open by a screech when they fly back and learn the news.