(The Astronaut Sons, Strangled by their Fathers in Preparation)
Images by David Lurvey and Anika Steppe
i. The Ausable River, 2010
There have been times lately
when I’ve imagined drowning,
and where it would happen best,
all the places the old men in my life
tried to teach me to swim. But
it never worked, never took, and instead
all I could imagine was swallowing an ocean, all the waters that connect to one another,
swallowing salt and sea life: pods, schools, every variety of deadly unloving jellyfish, the skeletons of sailors trailing seaweed after them in death, coral clumps, the fooling lures of angler fish.
All this I imagined within me, replacing the air in my feeble lungs;
I imagined it surrounding me as my father and grandfather, stoutest limbs on my family tree,
led me out too deep and pulled me under into the blackgreen where I knew I would die;
and it remained behind as I crashed upward and
crawled back choking upon the ashen beach, coughing
and spluttering like the first ancient unfish
that birthed my oldest ancestor.
ii. Tawasentha Park, 1998
On blinding concrete around the public pool
there are children running, defying signs, the
warning cries of adults: parents, lifeguards, coaches;
none wish for the fall that will break
their innocents open. I am among these innocent
half-people, waddling in bare feet at the edge
of bright, clear blue. I am eight, it is summer,
and my parents leave me here, pay for me to fall
into cold and wet, hoping I will discover some new
affinity for the dark and thudding play on my eardrums,
the scent turned solid below the surface pressing up
into my nose (burning chlorine in the nose and eyes;
this is how you learn).
But I have not yet fallen, and I stare into blue,
avoiding the eyes that will look at my dry skin and
see the truth it betrays, the essential cowardice,
when there come slapping footfalls on the concrete
and a thin pale hand waving in my face—a boy
from my class that year named Rice. He is red hair
over a white potbelly in swim trunks,
pleased to see me in this new place of learning,
a new chance to prove himself above me, and as
he will later skirt the surface with his clumsy
but confident strokes, I know I will be floating
lower, a test case for new lifeguards, bloating,
stuck in glass or any other liquid moving so slowly
it will trap—display—any living thing within it.
I see him in the future, above me as I don’t even
struggle, filling up at the bottom; he will be pleased
with his next and greatest success—survival
turned into simple tiered academia.
But the swim school hasn’t started yet,
and he just smiles as I blink and stare in the
stupid June light. He slaps my hand for the summer
and jumps into the water. I don’t follow
like he thought I would.
iii. Fern Lake, 1992
Vision ringed by trees—
towering, scraping pines!—
I am in the wet embrace of
the water I love:
light and easy, shallow
but enough to hold
me, make me as light
and easy as—
the sandy bottom sometimes
scrapes me knees;
swimcrawling through
watery wet lake—
makes me as light and
easy as the mistake
or accident, malfunction
of body mechanic, and
I am choking coughing
not above or below but
breathing in the thin surface—
the trees, my parents, leaning over.
iv. Altamont, 1999
On the floor again of the old kitchen
after another summer spent thrashing
for nothing in public pools under the
strained patience of paid instructors,
my father has me waiting for his plan.
Stripped to swim trunks
indoors, I stand crossing my arms and shiver
at the thought of my body suspended,
newly eternal in the timeless cold and dark,
never needing to draw breath again.
The cold tap is running
and my father stands at the sink;
the refusal to admit
defeat has hardened him,
stiffened the limbs supporting his weight
against the cracking countertop.
The tap stops and on the linoleum below
he places a cooler, deep and blue, filled
with clean cold water. My face has learned
to reject the wet and now as we kneel there
my father promises to fix me. He holds
me under and I pray for gills.