Let’s Go Swimming
I.
Stories cannot repeat themselves when people are involved.
The man walking on water, rifle slung over shoulder, should serve as a warning.
Everything about the day is an inside-out yellow so establish the distance between you, your
next conversation and your executioner.
Somewhere someone is using flattery.
Somewhere someone is talking about killing a squirrel, needing a haircut, pulling a curtain
closed.
Noon is scented with these decisions.
Sounds of water like the unbuckling of a belt indicate that sex is nearer.
If you dress in disguise and enter a distressing situation, you may be obliged to remain based on
the false premise.
Somewhere an iced cake with your name waits in a wall papered kitchen while you shuffle
photographs of shape and color.
These movements are governed by the bored arms of a strong audience.
Your fans have not yet been called into being.
When they arrive, they will help us build our new room.
II.
If the water is littered with seaweed or gelatinous creatures, I will swim in it.
If the water is coated in sulphuric outer space foam – and you know what I’m talking about – I
will get in.
If the water is garrisoned with empty bags of doritos, cigarette butts and rows of voyeurs, I will
still get in the water.
An underwater reed is a quiet reed.
Events occurring in water could be described as ceremonial, like a baptism, an underwater
promissory note to god.
Baptismal fonts are not large enough to swim in.
I am often misplacing diffidence for soundlessness.
When I am tired of my things, gestures displace sound.
Everything I put in this drawer belongs to me.
If this drawer were placed in the middle of a busy intersection it would be run over before
picked over.
There would be injury before objects could be claimed for use.
Goggles and steel wool would no longer be goggles and steel wool.
Family dinners would be reduced to a plate of hostile gestures.
When trees can’t get through to people they turn their attention to buildings.
Throughout the year paper fails and ducks ascend a lake
with inquiry more logical than a recipe.
III.
Everyone is present when I undress He-man and bury him in the backyard under the swing set.
The gamble is whether he will remain underground or tunnel his way back into his armor.
The probability of this depends on whether he is able to swim.
In walking the distance between here and the storm door leading to the basement, it is easy to
lose count of your steps.
It is not important to retrace an exact path but it is to be exact in enumeration.
Walking may be the only thing left.
Carrying a sword will keep you from having to explain yourself to a group of historians when
they follow you to a snow-packed jetty and lower you slowly into the bay.
It is still winter but do not be discouraged by the temperature of the water.
There is no honest road back to autumn and its broad leaf.
If administered in sheets, water will quell the need to destroy small left over things.
If you pull all eight legs from a spider’s body counting to ten between each gentle tug, you still
will not have arrived.
The thought of coming up stands in conflict to the distance between you and the surface.
Eye contact, like smoking, is nearly impossible underwater.
I’m thinking about making important decisions for you.
If we act now, things will stay dry for a long time.
| Alex Cuff |
|
levelheaded: Let’s Go Swimming
This poem begins with an invitation: “Let’s Go Swimming.” It’s simple enough, serving as an introduction to the poem’s preoccupation with water and establishing a directly conversational connection with the reader. More importantly (and more subtly), the title tells us how to read the poem. It lets us know that as we read, we will be “swimming.” We will be moving around a realm where things are muted and blurred, where things float past us without full comprehension.
The first line of the poem also provides some guidance. The speaker starts out by telling us what “Stories cannot” do. It’s an immediate cue that we won’t be following a particular narrative, or that whatever narrative we get may not be “true” in a certain sense. For instance, “The man walking on water” in the following line brings to mind a recognizable biblical moment. But when it’s coupled with the “rifle slung over shoulder,” we are suddenly somewhere else.
Something similar happens at the beginning of the third section. We’re presented with a story about the burial of “He-man” (likely a figurine). The first three or four sentences describe and wonder about the burial. The fifth, “It’s not important to retrace an exact path but it is to be exact in enumeration,” steps away from the narrative to offer a kind of explanatory epigram. This line drops the “He-man” narrative to remind us it’s not about “story” but abstractly about “enumeration.”
The poem takes many turns like this, jumping from specificity to ambiguity. And even in moments of specificity the poem leaps from thought to thought. Take these lines in the middle of section II: “Baptismal fonts are not large enough to swim in. / I am often misplacing diffidence for soundlessness.“ There is a disconnect between these two ideas. There isn’t much immediate connection between the two lines. The poem consistently operates within this disconnect, as if the quiet area of thought between the lines is most important.
It’s also worth looking at the poem’s form, which is mostly consistent. With one exception (at the end of section II), every line break occurs at the end of a sentence or at the page’s margin. This gives each line (or each sentence, rather) a special autonomy. The sentences begin and end, then we move on to the next sentence. It all seems rather obvious, but since we’re used to poems with sentences broken up amid several lines, it feels like this poem’s doubled up on the separation between lines and ideas. That one exception in section II uses the word “logical” (and “recipe”) to reiterate that even when language is organized logically there is an immense space between the words, the phrases, and the messages.
– The Editors
