Swimming With You

I am floating in a backyard swimming pool when a memory comes back to me. . .

That you and I swam together in a pond formed after big spring rains - that I floated in the cool black water, and then I fell silent, listening to your strokes rumble in water-bound echoes. I can see you popping up from below the surface, bright brown-eyes, blinking sunrises, locking with mine.

Then you went under again. In the wake of your movements, I bobbed and sank a bit, moving just enough to hold position. I spoke after your submerging body in words that swam from my mouth like aimless fish.

A more complete quiet interjected itself as a witness that watched me as I watched you. You surfaced and called my name, making the sound of it ring from your full pink lips, telling me that the pond was deep. Your words tugged on me. What did I want to tell you? To ask you?

I know how water thins the membrane between body and mind. I can see backward into that time and feel its scratching pass, a subtraction, the drift of something escaping. Your wet skin- an image that shimmers. I can see you pausing for an instant. Then, gone.

This swim proved to be our last for that year. Weeks passed and, by August, we couldn't swim the brackish pond. Grasses choked even the deeper parts. And floating here today, I have come to find what I had wanted to tell you.

I let the words lift up to the sugar blue sky.

October 1, 2010

Untying the Knot

What if I cease the anxiety? Give a rest to the focus on the yet-to-be? Or quiet the cringe that grips me when I rework old stories?

What power can words have to capture where I am now trembling between substance and dissolution? Can I, through silence, give myself an instant of peace?

But the noise seems not to end.

I went with you when you talked about a place called nothingness. Colorless gray - non-existent, empty. That beyond what my senses allow, that is what is!

No timber bamboo clacking in warm Hawaiian breeze. No blood red skin glowing when I put my hand before the sunlight. No bite of salt air or crunch of soot black sand. Not even the crystalline sparkle caught in a single suspended drop of moisture at the tip of a single leaf hanging inches above my head.

None of it! Not even me, myself, standing here before this thundering surf. Not now and now not tonight sparkling pitch night sky hangs in a dome over my upturned eyes.

You have told me I have made this moment within the fluid of my own mind. It is nectar then! Let that be truth as well. Let me absorb the blaze of this dream and shine in on you!

Can you join me in this creation of my own imagining. A moment for you, too in an unsurpassed present that owes and obligates no one?