WWPH WRITES Poetry

Ode to Backstroke

Let’s begin where most folks begin to swim — with freestyle.
England, in an unusual moment of clarity, calls it “front crawl”.
To me, this seems apt, as I crawl through water to the wall like
a hurtling turtle, never quite streamline, never sublime, gasping
for random intakes of breath, kicking when I remember (legs, legs,
legs, legs!) only to turn, push off and begin the battle all over again.

Breast must be next. Friend of the little old ladies, who swim with
their purple rinses confidently protected under patterned plastic caps.
They love that they can swim without smudging their mascara. Man,
they even wear glasses! As for me, I just feel like a frog, goggled-eyes
looking appropriately googly, head bobbing up and down taking my
breaths every other stroke. Plunge, pull up. Plunge, pull up. Breathe.

Don’t get me started on butterfly! Do not be fooled, it is nothing
like its insect namesake. I watch the swim team teens rocket down
their lanes (no time to stop and flutter with flowers). Dolphin kick?
More believable, but unreachable. My daughter tried to teach me “fly”
once, but my hips had other plans. The lifeguards came running in red,
ready to save the swimmer with limbs frantically fitting in the water.

At last, my beloved backstroke! I kick and glide, following concrete
lines on the lime-green ceiling. Water covers ears with a blissful kiss of
silence. Arms brush cheeks gently as they pass. My muscles pull me
smoothly, firmly, finally where I want to go. And in the summer, when
the outdoor pools open and children frolic and paddle in the shallows, I
lie on my back and flutter kick, eyes hypnotized by skies of infinite blue.

©Mel Edden 2024

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Everything the Light Touches

There were quiet places in her hometown that retained familiar shades—places that, unbeknownst to everyone else, contained wrapped in their environments exact facsimiles of moments that had shaped her life. The pond by the park was one such place.

How a pond could be elegant, she wasn’t sure. How a pond could be sweeping, she wasn’t sure. It was man-made; rushes and bits of garbage tattered the edges, but there was a fountain in the center, and it seemed to be the midpoint around which circled the mountains, the modest range that spread about the valley town. She had been back, now, a year. She had placed a distance between her and her old life that divided it as far as east was from west. She had been caught up, rose, fell. And now there seemed nowhere to go.

There was a parking lot by the pond, which was where she stood. It was night. Her shift at the restaurant was over, and her body felt clammy with grease. The spring air was cool and almost cut through it. She smoked a cigarette.

Why, though, was she drawn here? This haunt, where she was usually alone at night, had become a repository for bouts of grief. She felt stopped up at home, in her childhood bedroom. She was sullen with her family. It was that gasp of potential seething from her memories of the pond that brought anguish out of her, but she kept coming back because it needed to get out. The wideness and the openness and the beauty assaulted her. Everything the light touches is yours.

As a child, here, she had imagined future boyfriends, naïve sketches that roughly materialized as a real record of boyfriends – the most recent of whom she’d married. Her ex-husband was a star professor who had taken up with her and left his wife. No one – truly no one – had supported their elopement. And the whole thing ended predictably when she found out he had started cheating with an artist friend. Not another younger woman, but an older woman. Someone a little closer to his vantage point and speed. She had been a means to a fleeting midlife end. Promising student, fêted darling, and him a coup billed to slice at once through marital bliss and a certain academic career.

Come and get me, she’d had to call and say. Her parents did, all the way to Brooklyn, enraged.

Now, what the light touched was dark and closed. No light edged into the closet of her heart. Now that idea had become inverted – no symbol of expansion, no wide-open life, but the reality that she’d have to learn to trust again. Not just other people but herself. Mainly herself. She’d been so stupid, and now nothing made her recoil so much as light.

It was light getting in, now, that frightened her. Open up. Try again. Where to now. The smiles of the regulars at the restaurant. A date she’d been pressured into by a pitying aunt. And someone, a gas station cashier, who was really trying. He was interested. And she pushed away his face, his eyes.

The world had become flat and toneless. There were no more dizzying heights. Her college friends, embarrassed, didn’t call. And no one knew her as quickly as she thought that everyone would know her, know her soon.

It was that old thing about pride. That old saw. And though her childhood imaginations had been innocent, what they ripened to was certainly not. There was a future, but first, there was a storm. Lightning shocks of shame, misery, self-excoriation—the rumbling all around of dark clouds—but afterward, the mildness of calm, a light that illumines, rather than dazzles: a proper proportion of shadow, humility—and peace.

©Emily Holland 2024