I.
I gathered with the others
at the pool each morning
to swim my laps, stretch
my arms and fly like a fish
that's also a bird and therefore
neither. I swam and turned,
swam and turned, as if
I still belonged to the world
in which my cold, original
body moved by instinct alone.
In which I turned on
the smallest stones that sank
beneath me to the sand,
and then became the sand.
II.
When I went under to bear
myself, I heard the single
voice of the drowned:
'The water teaches you
to remember by learning,
as if there were nothing
to remember at all except
your fear, which is the terrible
start to swimming.'
III.
Because I found the form
I lost inside the water,
paddling like a dog at first,
then moving in broader,
stronger strokes that took
me under and also across,
and because I believed
I had swum before in
the firmament as a soul
or angel, gazing up, then
down from the waters
that magnify the world
as an unborn child in
the Mother void, I knew
I had lived in them
for millions of years.
IV.
An old man barely walking
in the shallow end with his son
who held his arm and talked
to him, was me, me, minus
the difference of him in time.
Was me plus the difference
of him as other—that double
in the arc of seeing beyond
my seeing for just a second.
He spoke in a frail but audible
voice about the weather—
nothing really—but the water
cleared like a lens in the magic
of his speaking, the sound
of which, but not the words—
the hum I'd say—revealed
the specks across the bottom.