And this poem which I wrote at about the same time
as the last one.
I think is about as close to speech as I can get.
It's called "First Exercise," and I wrote it
when I began swimming about a year and a half ago.
"First Exercise."
"I was swimming because I wanted to get skinny
having passed the age of 30 when the body begins
its gradual revenge for all those days of inattention it's
secretly begrudged all along.
So I was finally paying it my full attention,
pulling it as I could back and forth across the pool's
width at the baby end, standing after each
lap to wait for breath and study the excellent rhythms
of the swimmers in the roped lanes of the Olympic pool
adjoining as the light from high-leaded windows
broke around them into diamonds on the waves.
And then nod to my companions at this end, two
impossibly vigorous white capped old men
and a dark woman in a black Spandex suit
that fit her like skin.
I've always hated swimming for impeccable reasons,
especially since I'm nearly blind without my contact
lenses.
And I didn't understand that the new goggles
I bought for my new regimen did not
mean I could keep my lenses in and see new thing.
So from one of my fancy underwater racing turns,
I came up without them, and stood, and looked,
and felt the rush of panic into my chest.
That disbelief when suddenly there's
a terrible cut across your face or someone loved is dead.
Of course, after a moment, I could think:
it's only my contact lenses.
But still I dived for them again and again,
trying to hold myself under to pet the tile with my palms.
And later as I walked home, the world a blur of dull color
run together, I thought of my friend diving
at dusk in a pond for his lost daughter
and what came to him when his hands sunk
in the cold mud at the bottom."