Water Experiments

Water Experiments

l.

To swim is 
not to sleep, although the two 
are similar. Yours and 
other bodies in a restless refracting 
intelligent body conducting 
bodies with ruthless ease. To slip 
under you need courage, or 
great fatigue. To float 
requires a skeptic’s mind.
To breach into light, first the 
surface must be expecting you.

ll.

Divers who pulled our
dead from their cars 
when the bridge 
collapsed swept 
for the limbs of the drowned.
They clutched 
toes or thighs or fistfuls of 
hair in soundless pitch, 
jubilant with each 
blind contact, 
for only those bodies 
felt could be brought home.

lll.

Soon you will be 
cumbersome on land, your limbs 
abhorring gravity, your body 
appalled by its magnitude, every 
thudding step a cry
for suspension in a 
body of silence and lift.
In your sleep, this 
body will come 
bearing spine of  seahorse, eardrum of 
whale, skin
of trout. You will don them 
each,
then break the surface.

--Kristen McHenry