after Bob Hicok & Aracelis Girmay
Now forty-five, having outlasted some of
myself, I must reflect: what if I hadn’t been held
by my mom in the YWCA basement
pool, her white hands slick under
my almost-toddler armpits, her thumbs
and fingers firm around my ribs (which
is to say lungs), held gently as a liverwurst
sandwich and pulled, kindly, under?
What if I hadn’t been taught to trust
water might safely erase me those years
I longed to erase or at least abandon care of
my disoriented, disdained body? I might have
drowned instead of just ebbed, never slid
from given embankments into this other
course.
Drift and abundance in what
she offered. The wider, indifferent ocean
of trade and dark passage not yet
mine to reckon. And so now, sharp tang
of other waters known, I am afloat, skin-
chilled, core-warm, aware of what lurks
and grateful to trust and delight
in our improbable buoyancy.
Copyright © 2017 by Elizabeth Bradfield. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on June 12, 2017, by the Academy of American Poets.