I am the boulder breathing heavy
on clifftop, heft of trepidation
sitting large on my lap. The pool gapes
a strange wound in the ground
as I slip the legs in, slink down
from the ledge like a limp seal.
Coldness when water creeps
the body above the hips, the chest,
draws a border across the neckline.
A boy whose lesson was before mine
watches with his mother on plastic chairs.
Their smooth and ordinary faces
float above the deep end
I’m inching towards
as the floor gives way eventually
and the surface splits my lips.
I do not know how to float.
I only know how to stand.
A kick, a wave, I’m all out of breath,
my hands fumbling for something certain
while the instructor glides towards me.
I contemplate this unwinding of time,
the man turned child turned head
mouthing the air for more living.
The boy watches intently.
Try the egg beater, she says,
pointing towards her feet that blend
the waters in fluent choreography,
as if this demonstration alone is
enough to tease apart my limbs.
My legs don’t move like that, I say.
In the half moment after I sink back down
but before my flailing can lift me up again,
I sense the boy’s eyes, those twin mirrors
refracted through a ripple in existence, and
I trace this orbit between the two of us
from his beginning to mine, the line
drawing shape to our private mutuality.
And as the instinctual kick punctures
the seal and light floods my lungs –
a pause for humility,
how loud it echoes.
–
Hoon Kim is a software engineer and poet. He lives in Seattle, WA.