After the boys were in bed,
I’d haul across the bright, brined roads
of January to the heated pool
and delve into chlorinated luminescence.
After crunching through crags of sallow snow,
the night swim.
Sixty-four laps, a solitary fantasia in the far lane.
Hurling resonant strokes and buoying my pink mass with nasal blasts.
Rising goggled and dizzy from the flip turn,
facing the immense window,
a dime-thin veil between humid steam-heads and frost stem-tails.
Years before, darker compline dips in Northwoods lakes.
Slick wooden planks and dock moss underfoot,
overhead the throbbing firmament.
No greater courage, at thirteen—talking to girls excepted
than a running leap, a cannonball of faith,
into waters known only at noon.
The first toe to catch a frond, a thrill of blind fathoms—could be a pike snout.
Come up quick and bolt back sandy
through the center aisle of the mosquitos’ assembly,
toward the A-frame cabin’s glow.
They warn against this in the Pacific.
Many curious, and some hungry,
presences encircle the volcanic beaches.
We do it anyway.
Only up to the waist, three pineapple Mai Tais
deep, feeling the trade winds on your sunburn.
Returning from last call, in the city by the lake,
my buddy with the cinematic oeuvre—out of daring or despair—
takes off his shoes and hat and drops five feet into the churning inlet.
“Well, I can’t let him die like this”, I think,
“I once placed in freestyle”.
I forfeit my effects to our third companion,
while the Malört roiled within.
Inward and downward, outward and onward,
I was carried away from rocky Edgewater
by the wine-dark swell.
Spitting, coughing, suspended over the deep,
pausing my paddling to reverence
the spangled escarpment of skyline,
I spied a sopping figure wade onto the beach.