Keeper

To Swim

5 To Swim Dear water, I loved you best back then—my upside-down house, kinder than sidewalks or too-high branches, the bent red bike that tipped me to the street. Blue more blue and the quiet more quiet, where I could be the anhingas I’d seen, floating and diving, there & gone & there, swift as fists or Sunday school angels parting the clouds of heaven. I learned because my mother was afraid, knew canals and pools, the eager sea as so many places a child could drown. I learned because she loved me, and I fell like Alice into somewhere else, my feet leaving tiles or a motorboat’s side to ride on almost nothing. Because she was afraid I called myself a bird, a fish, and because she loved me I tried to be a boat, and grew myself to fear and love until they became like children, mine, twins who looked so much alike I could hardly tell them apart or ever hold them close enough. ...