SWIM
after Li-Young Lee
A body is three-fourths winter
and the rest a hot summer rain.
Forget what you know
about corporeal water
for just this moment.
A body’s one-part frozen lake in a rural town,
the area ominous
when you aren’t familiar, thrilling
to find, and to be, this almost-smooth, uneven
dance floor, temporary and precarious.
Water holds
memory of where
it has been. When this ice cracks,
the rift warns
I will be unburdened
of beliefs.
//
We have been fighting
all week and making love to come
up for air from drowning. Every
morning we promise
each other we will work
this out, but we haven’t touched
entirely what this is. Each word we throw
out threatens a proof that may disintegrate
the other’s thesis of Self. Say it
in ice: Once, we drew
our names in a heart
into the rime, recognizing
its potential for melting.
A body lives
in layers of ice and bone
and tropical storm. Tell me you’re here
on purpose, tell me you didn’t just press
your lips to my frost
and get stuck here.
Stumbling over fissures in our brittle
identities, our hoarded traumas bubble
up through the lake’s melting
surface we are sure
will break us open and bury
us alive under water. Witness, this slab
of frozen personas splitting,
we believe will drown us, signals
spring is blooming. If we can navigate
the map of this shattering,
we may yet
swim.
The Los Angeles Press 