Poems for the Golden Fish

Clear Boundary

If I look up,

I can see the Charles

Beyond my manager’s desk.

I see developers walk back and forth

delivering printed code

to those who live by consuming paper

Golden fish

You are missing,

My dear friend

And there's no searching for you

I have a screen in front of me all the time

Your voice

Your words

Bless it

Make the bits of bytes come alive

Here

we are black and white

and binary

broken into 0s and 1s

Droning code

While the crickets play every variation

of their theme

My prince

You broke away slowly

One lap behind

Or ahead

Underwater in a splash

A dead blank screen.

Smooth as the surface of water

on that last windless day.

When the ripples of our bodies

were holy

Were a miracle

I knew you once in flesh

(Every fiber, every hair)

And now

your mind is behind this glass

This ice

Thicker than winter

And you do not break the surface

My eye misses your voice

Everything is spam

Everywhere

People are happy

And I look for you

Under the lily pads

==

“Where are you?”

“Make me feel again”

===

Sky Swimming

If you were listening,

I’d tell you where I was last night.

Dreams of swimming the Hudson

Or maybe East River

Can't identify the bridge

But maybe it's too close

I’m too close

and see only

the steel rising up from the water

like a ladder

Friendly as scaffolding

Dreams about climbing

Mean challenges in your life

You are trying to overcome

Insurmountable

and Emotionally Exhausting

Sisyphus

Just when I finally arrive

you are not there after all.

But I

Dive deep and there is a tunnel

Of air

where you can

Fly through the water

Like a train

A subway

And I see but do not look for

The fish that follows me

Gold like wheat

Like the farmer

Tall blonde Norwegian

Also silent

Who harvests the golden wheat

And the fish burned golden

As he pulls it from the oven

And the golden sunset window

Over his shoulder

That he never notices

And I swimming

swimming

swimming  across this river

Until I realize I can stand up

and the water is not deep after all

I forgot!

(I’m struggling against myself)

Stretch up out of it

Like a bird

And fly across

I forgot I could fly!

It turns out

It is the

Same as swimming

But less wet

===

When I Give in and Start Yelling at You

I talk to you when I swim.

As if you are swimming beside me

As if you would swim beside me

And the only thing preventing you

Is that call I didn't make.

I don't have to do this alone,

You know

Plenty of other friends

Who would come with me

You know.

You could be my witness

Here

You know

If you could

Why are you

so stubbornly

disappeared?

==

The Praying Mantis Stops To Watch

He saw her on his walk

A bobbing head

Hoping for a beaver

Or a dog

Almost disappointed at the human

Although it will always be his most unusual sighting in this pond.

He notes the expanse of skin

And wonders if the hair

Wet clumping at the base of her neck

Might be hiding

The string of her suit

He decides to talk to her

Shouts from the shore

But she doesn't hear

He's too old

To be yelling at swimmers

Easily fitting into a category

Of old man

He could follow her until she got out

And he did

Afraid to hide in the bushes

Hoping shed see him

Allowing her to out him

Willing her to see him

As a fellow nature

Naturalist

Nudist

He'd ask her why

This is too odd a place to swim

They'd talk about

Birds

Wildflowers

Peaks

Biology

She'd be impressed

By his spotting abilities

How he knows the Latin names

Of every bug

She'd probably jump

When he showed her all she was swimming next to

He waits, quietly, near a landing

Where she is likely to emerge

Waves to her,even!

And she waves back friendly

And he finds a Praying Mantis

And loses sight of her

698 words

Hardy Pond

You pull the car over.  Slowly it rumbles over dead leaves and crackling branches until coming to a rest behind a tree leaning out into the street.  A perfect Secret Parking Spot.

Like an Astronaut, you transfer your Anxieties.  The “Getting Ticketed/Getting Towed”, flows easily into “Forgetting Things”.  (Should you leave a towel on a tree in case the car gets towed? And if it does, should you keep your cell phone with the towel?  Why not throw them into a bag with some water.  And a snack.  Maybe some shoes.)

And then you decide to just get out.  

This funny, hidden patch of water.  “Hardy” Pond, named after a family, but oddly enough, maybe named for its sturdiness.  The ability to always bounce back.  

Like the Charles River, but unlike waterways called “views”, all the houses around have their backs to it.  As if it’s just a forest, or a desert. As if everyone looks past it, and not at it.  If you ever got an apartment within view, you’d sit staring at it with all your lights off.  Every night.

During your MBA classes, you drove here, to escape.  You met another lost soul.  Who tried to convince you the virtues of soup that had mold growing on it.  “I just stir it back up and turn the heat on high.  It’s good for you!  My son disagrees with me.  Calls it disgusting”

You seem to remember the earlier part of the conversation involved the exchange of a few profound ideas.  But you’ve lost everything except for the disgusting soup.

Disgusting soup.  That’s what you imagined the pond to be as a little kid.  Your house was built on the top of the hill, 50 years before you were born.  As a “vacation cabin” for fancy families from Boston. (But there was a couple who lived there, the only owners-the time machine you wish so desperately for could really come in handy to meet them)

Hardy Pond was known as a swimmer’s paradise.  You easily imagine kids skipping down the dirt roads in early April, lilacs blooming like crazy. And they would jump in.  Swim clear across with not a care in the world.

But the entire time you were growing up,all you heard about was pollution.  Drowned shopping carts, covered with weeds.  And you vaguely remember hearing stories of it being “cleaned up” since then.  Dredged, trash removed.  What do they do to the water to purify it?  If there’s no chemical factory, what’s the worst that could be in the water?

As long as you don’t put your head under, you’ll be safe, you tell yourself.  No danger of swallowing, or getting that eye disease that Katherine Hepburn got when she was thrown into a canal in Venice (was that sewage?).  She cried constantly for the rest of her life.

That movie “Ghost Story”, about young college boys in the 20’s, in love with a woman.  She hits her head on a stone fireplace and they think she’s dead.  Naturally, they sacrifice their Model T and run it into the lake, with her in the backseat.  

She revives just long enough for them to see her clutching at the back window.

“I’m still alive”

Why didn’t they jump in to save her?

Before you realize it, your feet touch the wet cold shore.  Lots of rocks and maybe glass, you keep an eye out.  Up to your knees. Makes you more eager to save your feet by starting to float.  Your hips.  There is a brown seaweed floating on the top of the water, stringy like hair, but not as gross.  You clear the water in front of you and soon you find it was only close to the shore.  Deep breath, your breasts and your shoulders.  You keep an eye out for anyone who might be watching you.  Anyone who turns off their lights to look at the water.

The morning is slightly cold, but not so bad.  If you do this at first light, you risk mosquitoes (another reason to get in ASAP), but you avoid the commuters who want to distinguish their days by calling in an emergency.  An Evil Do-Gooder who wants to “save” you from waters where you must’ve fallen in.  You have no desire to be rescued, or to be interrupted.  

Especially if you are going to swim across today.

There are a family of ducks.  They make ducks sounds at you and avoid you, but nothing out of the ordinary.  No sense of alarm, like you are a crocodile.

Crocodile.  Now, you are well aware that is a false fear.  But there are other critters, a snapping turtle would be the worst.  Probably.  Do they always swim underwater? Do they attack unprovoked?

By now, you’ve been doing strokes for a few minutes now.  Flip over to get a new perspective.  Everything looks different now.  The left headlight of your car is barely visible behind the tall grass by the shore.  You are a good way out now.  There’s no easy way to measure the distance, but it’s further than the kiddie area would be. Further than you ventured in your teens.  The first time you swam across Walden was when you were 19.  And even then, you weren’t sure why you waited so long.  Like taking a journey, just put one foot in front of the other.  The main thing to get over was fear.

Don’t think about the turtles.

Next time wear flippers.  They can nip at your legs, but you want to keep all your toes.

You can see the mint green vinyl siding of Joe’s house.  Your Mom’s on-again, off-again, older boyfriend.  He’d been living in that house, 2 houses from the water, since he came back from the war.  The typical American life.  He told that story about swimming in the Charles, and his white shorts being turned into a rainbow color.  Now THAT’s pollution!

There’s another house that has a makeshift dock.  You see a few overturned canoes and fishing boats which somehow give you courage that you are not the pioneer that you’d like to imagine.

Which is better, to go where no man (HA!  Man!)  has gone before, or to just be the first in decades?  

And you continue to wonder if the bigger question today is if you should tell anyone at all?

==

There are a batch of apartments off to your right now.  You look up, knowing you are shielded somewhat by the stand of trees on the unkempt part of the shore.  You walked along that beaten path before.  Some summer time when you were exploring everything by foot, stubborn in your refusal to get a car or a license.  turning every 5 minute errand into a 2 hour workout, but you were happy for the connection to the Earth.  And how it kept you apart from those who made money to fill their cars with.  Back when you were free.

The path cuts behind the apartment complex and connects your neighborhood to the supermarket, and allows you to avoid the series of mini malls which took over the mini-golf and bowling alley of your childhood.  Come to think of it, you could have swum this route before to get groceries.  (How would you have carried them back?)

This distance also seems further than Walden, but you aren’t giving up yet.  In fact, the far side of the pond flows into some drainage pipe, as tall as you are.  Best to avoid that, in case there is a sudden riptide.  Current?  Would it suck you into the sewage system of the town?

No rule about having to touch the other side, really, just enough to find another swimming entrance, should you come back a different way.  You come close enough to the other side to encounter the brown hair moss again, less dense here, somehow.  You cautiously feel around with your feet for the ground and instead of slimy stones, you find a nice squishy sand.  You know this feel from Walden.  The top layer of decaying pine needles. Something you were afraid of as a kid, but nothing that bothers you now.  

You stand, not tired, and not out of the water.  Surveying the shore, like Henry would have done.  There are some deep coves off to one side.  If you were especially curious or had more time, or frankly, if you at least wanted to, you could swim along the shore and explore them.  But, honestly, you’d rather just get back to your car.  Swim straight across, like the way you came.  The road that you carved on the water; patches of moss collected together when you cleared them from your path, and no descernably clear line that shows you came through at all..

So much time has passed, to you it seems like the sun should realize that it is midday.  But loads of people still aren’t even up yet.  From the middle of the pond you can see some roads, but very few moving cars.  And no people anywhere.