The Swimmers

1

This September morning it was snowing in Denver.I told you that I dreamed my face was being liftedoff my face. You told me that you couldn’t find your hat.The whirling wicker houses full of dreamshave never been ours, but the basements look the same:putting the lid down on the washer, turning the dialunder the bare bulb. The light falls where it canand makes a house we live in while the light lasts.It’s true what Jennifer said this morning on the docks:the shepherds in the ancient pastoral, unhoused, say “nevertheless”and share a meal together before parting.To have such sorwe and be not ded—a car honksto get us out of the way. And a pair of girls, faces masked,are running fast as they can down Harmony Street, towards the    Sound.

2

Bobbing in the water talking to Ken about ChaucerI hold my hand up to block the sudden glareand go down under the chop.Our friends are swimming longer distancesnow that the days for swimming are almost over.What have I done the last twenty yearsbesides come to know you? First with laughterand deflection, then with anger and loss,now with truth hanging in the afternoonover our heads, and whispering somethingthat we strain to hear. There were yearsI thought I knew that language, sent backevery signal with my own reply. But now it’s just me coming out of the water towards you,the day after the storm, when the surface moveswith the weeds and wrack, billowing up from the rocks.

3

This is the first evening when the summer changes,the water from the fog hangs onthe telephone lines. A full moon scabs and heals.The light is more hospitable to shadow now.The leaves record the intervals of wind,the light-strewn leaves and cigarette buttshere outside the United Church of Stonington.Last night Jonathan stopped talkingand pointed at the seabirds breaking piecesoff the harbor. Later, after everyone had gone,while coming up the stairs, I thought I heardthe swallows, but when I looked it wasthe blue and calmless sky, unbroken.

4

Never having wanted to be so thoughtless, neverso hopeless, never having wanted to drive thesenorthern distances without you, never havingto risk the end of myself, the ruin of the houseI kept inside my mind for you, the ruin of my mind,the linear tear the sky makes through itselfwhile the world burns, the ruin of the worldto shivering jets of toxin where Joannajerks her leg up from the murk. It could have beenthe algae. It could have been the warmth sending us outeach day, then into separate houses when the sunsetpiles its glamor into the table like a mirror and it willhave been the air that sabled the pine, the elm, the oak,the lawn, the air itself, the aim of the trail of the boat’swake. Endlessly the lights in houses flicker and come on.

5

Alone on the deck, I watch for signs of lifein the cupola windows. It’s the panic hour:I can see my heartlessness in the ashen skythat’s neither ash nor cloud but somethingof pure temperature. I know that if I waitit will dissolve. The day slumps in a linefrom Westerly to Old Mystic, fracturing the current.But it makes a brightness anyway. You and Igrew up unnoticed on our front lawns, waitingfor the past to change to weather. Now the past is over.Walking under the mountains, you’re so far from herethat I’ve mistaken clouds for the snow falling.None of the things I ever asked you for you couldn’t do.I watch the trees grow dark with night, but slowly.