Poetry 2016 -- Swimming Lessons and Others

Swimming Lessons A mile across the lake, the horizon bare or nearly so: a broken sentence of birches. No sand. No voices calling me back. Waves small and polite as your newly washed hair push the slime-furred pebbles like pawns, an inch here. Or there. You threaded five balsa blocks on a strap and buckled them to my waist, a crazy life vest for your lazy little daughter. Under me, green deepened to black. You said, “Swim out to the deep water.” I was seven years old. I paddled forth and the water held me. Sunday you took away one block, the front one. I stared down at my legs, so small, so nervous and pale, not fit for a place without roads. Nothing in these depths had legs or need of them except the toeless foot of the snail. Tuesday you took away two more blocks. Now I could somersault and stretch. I could scratch myself against trees like a cat. I even made peace with the weeds that fetch swimmers in the noose of their stems while the cold lake puckers and preens. Friday the fourth block broke free. “Let it go,” you said. When I asked you to take out the block that kept jabbing my heart, I felt strong. This was the sixth day. For a week I wore the only part of the vest that bothered to stay: a canvas strap with nothing to carry. The day I swam away from our safe shore, you followed from far off, your stealthy oar raised, ready to ferry me home if the lake tried to keep me. Now I watch the tides of your body pull back from the hospital sheets. “Let it go,” you said. “Let it go.” My heart is not afraid of deep water. It is wearing its life vest, that invisible garment of love and trust, and it tells you this story. Nancy Willard, a Knopf poet and novelist, and a beloved author of books for children, whose 1982 picture book A Visit to William Blake’s Inn received the Newbery Medal, died in February. Willard wrote seventy books during her long career and also taught English at Vassar College for nearly half a century — she was known around the campus as “the lady on the bicycle,” because she never learned to drive. Today we remember her with a pair of poems which remind us that the child’s view is essentially poetic, while the poet’s view retains something of the child’s curiosity and hope. Questions My Son Asked Me, Answers I Never Gave Him 1. Do gorillas have birthdays?     Yes. Like the rainbow, they happen.     Like the air, they are not observed. 2. Do butterflies make a noise?      The wire in the butterfly’s tongue      hums gold.      Some men hear butterflies      even in winter. 3. Are they part of our family?     They forgot us, who forgot how to fly. 4. Who tied my navel? Did God tie it?      God made the thread: O man, live forever!      Man made the knot: enough is enough. 5. If I drop my tooth in the telephone      will it go through the wires and bite someone’s ear?      I have seen earlobes pierced by a tooth of steel.      It loves what lasts.      It does not love flesh.      It leaves a ring of gold in the wound. 6. If I stand on my head      will the sleep in my eye roll up into my head?      Does the dream know its own father?      Can bread go back to the field of its birth?  7. Can I eat a star?     Yes, with the mouth of time     that enjoys everything. 8. Could we Xerox the moon?      This is the first commandment:      I am the moon, thy moon.      Thou shalt have no other moons before thee. 9. Who invented water?      The hands of the air, that wanted to wash each other. 10. What happens at the end of numbers?        I see three men running toward a field.        At the edge of the tall grass, they turn into light. 11. Do the years ever run out?       God said, I will break time’s heart.       Time ran down like an old phonograph.       It lay flat as a carpet.       At rest on its threads, I am learning to fly. _____________________ Today, a brief poem by C. P. Cavafy (1863-1933), who, the translator Daniel Mendelsohn writes in his introduction to Complete Poems, lived in a seemingly dull and ordinary fashion: “The cluttered, déclassé surroundings, the absence of aesthetic distinction, the startlingly conventional, to say nothing of middlebrow, taste: Cavafy’s apartment, like his job, gave little outward sign of the presence of a great artistic mind—the place from which the poetry really came.” In the Same Space House, coffeehouses, neighborhood: setting that I see and where I walk; year after year.  I crafted you amid joy and amid sorrows: out of so much that happened, out of so many things.  And you’ve been wholly remade into feeling; for me.