Exepts From 60 Pour Caprices For A Long Distance Swimer Poem by dark queen

A friend asks why I swim. Why not a movie? A drink? Dinner? I answer that I swim for strength,
For rippling triceps and a dimple in my thigh. I hide the lie with a stroke: I swim for the silence of the water.
2. An older woman stopped swimming and watched me. What a graceful stroke! What she loved, of course, was the mirrored beauty of her youth-the forgotten pleasure of her toughened skin.
3. The water undulates like a womb I do not remember. My fingers poke through for life. The air is unfamiliar.
4. I tell a friend that life is water. With a pretended fluidity his heart mimics the ocean but he cannot swim. He answers that a cell full of water explodes.
5. Seventy-year old women stand naked in the locker room. Some use walkers, others have artificial hips, scarred legs and missing breasts, still, they love this morning swim with the distant sun rising.
6. In these women, I witness how I too will age. I avert my eyes, move to far lanes and other shadows.
7. I swim past men to prove my strength after years of 'throwing like a girl, ' I lap them twice.
10. I tap slower swimmers' feet to pass them. Their skin startles me, as though I've come upon schools of spot running south for winter.
15. I dream of fire. I dream of fire and combustion. The things water does not heal.
17. How do we breathe underwater? A moment without air is magic. Through goggles, I watch the bubbles insist on my life.
18. Fifty others swim in the pool. Water molecules vibrate with our personalities. I swallow each person's breath, yet remain alone.
21. This-is-the-point-where I always-want to stop. Turn-legs-ache-lungs heave-arms weary-the distance-is forever-force the push-break water.
22. Every morning, two crows perch near the pool's glass doors and peck madly at their reflections. When no one watches, I jump out of the pool and run, arms raised and mouth squawking, to chase them away.
23. Then all three of us jump-the crows with fright to the sky-and me, chilled, to the diving well.
24. Every other breath my face sculpts a water mask.
26. Blood throbs, echoing the physics of water and sound. It sets up a rhythm between myself and other swimmers.
29. At a certain angle, the hand slices sheets of water. This requires a force the body is unaware of, even as pounds of water move away like the curtain rising over the first act.
30. What does it mean to drown in a dream? Is there the hope of bellying-up like a fish? Are we forced to forget breathing?
31. Some days there is no difference between sleep and dreams, between swimming and drowning, water and air.
36. After a winter of depression, inches of sadness float across the pool.
37. Sometimes, breathing, the heaviness of my own life amazes me. Sucking on air, I consume the world.
'40. Breaststroke beads the surface like mercury on skin. I'm a skeet barely touching water, needing it only to serve my own motion.
41. I try to describe my father, but he eludes me, fast as a rock skipping the ocean. I try to describe my mother, but she is too much myself-familiar as oxygen gurgling about my waist.
42. I learned to walk because my sister was born and I knew that I would never be carried again.
43. I learned to swim because my father threw me in the deep end and shouted 'Swim! '
44. I sweat in the water and my face is cooled, ice cooled on ice.