You in Your Jelly-Green Shoes
- You in Your Jelly-Green Shoes
Underwater stones clapped together make muffled clicks:my hair floating wave-wise in the lake's tourmaline.
Don't lean under the dock with your jellies on, you'll be caught on the barrel-floatwire. And down. Come up for air (an instant) there, there:
stone-water ground down; you alone with the elements, alongwith curious finny-tail minnows, silvered blue gills filing by:
submerged history with its halting increments: flatworm, cockle,urchin, barnacle, snail, salamander—sundries, assuming.
You could be anyone submerged or short of breathwhen the cleft before you is a leap you have to make,
risk of water, cliffs, rocks about to give, lurkers undercover—the world a sea barge with tarp at a tilt, not quite belly-up. [End Page 104]
Lynne Potts lives in New York and Boston. Her professional work includes articles, newsletters, case statements, and proposals for more than eighty organizations, government agencies, and institutions. Her poems have appeared in Paris Review, Southern Humanities Review, Arts Times, Oxford Journal, Inkwell, Southern Poetry Review, Phi Kappa Phi, and numerous other literary journals. She has taught poetry on the elementary, high school, and college levels.
