September: Poems

The Inversion

12 The Inversion Really something, the parents called him, with his ready jokes and pedal boat. He’d take kids out in it to the center of the lake, over the whispering grasses, past the marsh where the herons and alligator lived. I was nine and shy and wild, always paddling further than allowed in my own blue canoe. I never intended to become an adult, to live as they did according to some inner metronome of chores. They kept returning to the same names and places so I’d grown in multiples no one knew. They saw only my skin and thought I lived on that surface humming with light. The day was bright, the black lake spotted with lily pads large and flat as platters. When his boat skimmed over them it made the sound of a hand rubbing methodically on nylon, sound against sound of pedals whining desperately as bedsprings. Across the lake, a woman laughed— a low bird called out— he had stopped us in the middle now, where to those on shore we were miniature: a pinch, a glint, a little anecdote long finished. 13 I was still and silent as an animal. I did not scream or say no. I had not known I could be one of the weak, and I let it enter me dead-dry and chaffing in the old inversion that makes the weak see the strong from that long weary distance, and they look so small in the smallness of what they will do. I was underwater, I was swaying like swamp grass, staring up at an old fat man thinking, someday he will see himself here, and then he’ll be human. There will be no relief. ...