The Folded Heart

Night Swimming

Night Swimming Last night as if I were nothing more than a silhouette, I entered the black water of the shallow end and, holding my breath, I scissored beneath the surface toward the big round light that shimmered, steady, unwavering, but far away, high above the black bars of the drain. And when I reached the light, I touched the bright chrome rim that held it bolted to the wall and stared into the lens. The water like a shield against the radiating beams allowed me to see the live filament burning slowly in its vacuum, the delicate tungsten sculpted like the sharp features of a face. Against the light my body cast a shadow like a bat's. Then I rose for air and hanging like a dead man on the edge of night, or like someone leaving the protection of a dream, far beneath myself, I saw the drain's crosshatch waver and then resolve into something hard and familiar. When I was five, alone, half-naked, I lay on a gurney outside an operating room and told myself I would not cry. The walls were yellow tile, the doors along the hall were green and closed, and I knew that soon I'd lie again beneath the lamp whose green eye shone high about the watery layers of ether, 47 48 where I could hear the voices and watch, as if through frosted glass, the large unfocused faces bob and blur and see the hands pass back and forth a sponge for sweat, some bloody packing, or specimen for biopsy. Though who at five could know what hands were meant to hold? Who set like a drain below the surface of the conscious world could understand about the thing cut out from them? A small removal that floats and hovers incessantly and keeps me swimming back attracted to the light and that eventual face, delicate, composed, so much like my own staring up into the bright blue operation of the day. ...