In memory of Robert Penn Warren
Across the blackened pond and back again,
he’s swimming in an ether all his own;
lap after lap, he finds a groove
no champion of motion would approve,
since time and distance hardly cross his mind
except as something someone else might find
of interest. He swims and turns, eking
his way through frogspawn, lily pads, and shaking
reeds, a slow and lofty lolling stroke
that cunningly preserves what’s left to stoke
his engines further, like a steamwheel plunging
through its loop of light. He knows that lunging
only breaks the arc of his full reach.
He pulls the long, slow oar of speech,
addressing camber-backed and copper fish;
the minnows darken like near wishes,
flash and fade—ideas in a haze of hopes
ungathered into syntax, sounding tropes.
The waterbugs pluck circles round his ears
while, overhead, a black hawk veers
to reappraise his slithering neck, and frogs
take sides on what or who he is: a log
or lanky, milk-white beast. He goes on swimming,
trolling in the green-dark glistening
silence and subtending mud where things
begin, where thoughts amass in broken rings
and surface, break to light, the brokered sound
of lost beginnings: fished for, found.