On the night I was baptized, I went with the deacon to stir the waters. So much
memory resolves itself into clutter and dust
no matter what it’s called upon to explain. My heart was a hollow room; I was
eleven years old. I remember
a boat paddle hidden behind the baptistry door, and how the deacon worked it
through the heated pool, hardly creasing
the surface. I asked why he was doing this and he whispered to me to be quiet,
that the sound would carry off the water
right out to the sanctuary beyond, where my relatives were already gathered in the
pews to witness my immersion. This was to be a lesson
in the workings of symbols. Alone in a Sunday School room, I slid into a white
robe someone had left on a hanger,
its polyester yellowed at the seams and stiffened from all the previous baptisms.
What would there be to tell of this
when it was over? In the fluorescent-lit hallway where I was made to wait, I could
hear the choir’s first hymn ending, and then
the pastor’s prayer-wrenched voice. He had winked when he went past and shown
me the rubber boot of the chest waders
under his robe. Tell me, why is it always the pedestrian, world-rapt images that
take hold and must be sorted out? I knew
I was being poured into something vast and shoreless; I knew to expect no
confirmation from the water that was just water and felt cold
against my skin even though the baptistry was heated. The preacher placed a
pocket handkerchief over my nose and mouth
and laid me back, the surface of the pool prying itself apart then suddenly
enfolded over me, and what I heard was the sound
of sound as it was being erased, the waters drawing me downward, relieving my
body of weight and all boundaries—
an elegant proof of how our words won’t hold most of what happens or close the
wounds of wonder
we worry and scratch at, this awe-laced question of how it is we were made to be
so gravity clasped and foreverward flung.