Skiing Barefoot over the Wrecks

<sup>I came to see the damage that was done
and the treasures that prevail.

            -- Adrienne Rich</sup>

The trick is to ease
the hold on the handle,
don’t allow knuckles
to knot like curtains
over a rod braced
between the shoulders
of a double-hung window.

I lie back in the water
to start, feet meeting
hands greeting rope
at mid-thigh,
ears immersed
in the amniotic bouillon,
listening only
to the heartbeat of the ocean
as if there is no other
world, was never
another world,
below me.

I give a thumbs-up
to the driver of the boat
who will ease me,
feeding me out
from the other
end of this cord,
before pulling taut
and I resist the drag.

This is not labor.
The spray claps my face
like applause, each drop
one of approval,
and while the wind
in my hair is generated,
the source of its power
is not man-drilled,
not a god
but the childish,
oblivious sun, who cares
nothing about what goes
on underneath it,
about what it can
or cannot dry up.

And I am up,
riding the weedy surface
on the flats of my feet,
over flooded, flattened
houses whose ghosts
billow under my soles,
blowing up
into a white-tipped
wake that my heels
zip through, sun-bruised,
mango-cured, tough
as sharks. Still

they are spiny
sea urchins, these spirits
of screened-in Florida
rooms where pianos used
to wait for hands reluctant
as fire in wet saw grass,
underutilized kitchens
owned by diners
who preferred restaurants,
bedrooms that saw nothing
more than too little
sleep, achieved
with the open mouth
of the dead
and disrespectful.


Now the Dade County
pine floors, once
so prized and polished
or scarred by termites
and the careening
claws of dogs have rotted,
either way, into driftwood.
Coral has gone back
to coral. The dogs
who have been left to us
wear lifejackets
and the dead live again,
reefs for grouper
and parrotfish.

If I look down
into the foundations
of heartbreak and recovery,
epiphanies and realizations,
culminations and failures,
I, too, will fall,
forgetting all fundamentals,
unable to tuck and roll,
my external walls
shooting nails
in every direction
to wash up later
on the beaches like teeth,
each room of my body
cartwheeling into disrepair.

So I keep my eyes
forward, toward
what would be
the ponytails of palms
and the canopies of mangos
if those trees still rooted
here, and my grip
casual, thumbs lined up
next to index fingers
as if on a golf club,
holding on
to nothing too dear
too dearly.