Swimming on a Summer Evening

Tonight I went swimming with my friend Michelle. She meets me at the club and we swim back and forth for about a half hour, chatting a little bit at the end of the lanes and while we shower. Tonight I swam on my back a bit more -- my neck is getting stronger. There was a sliver of moon in the early evening sky, 7 pm, still bright daylight but the sun low behind the tall redwoods. The afternoon feeling is heightened by the murky luminescence of sunscreen and sweat in the water -- a day of swim lessons, swim team practice, and little kids always leaves the water smelling and tasting like a sticky afternoon. I was glad to swim and feel stronger, glad to have a chance to talk to a grown up about something other than my job, glad to think about this poem, that I wrote many years ago, swimming after work, watching the moon lapping me in the sky as I swam on my back then, no longer angry.

Forgiveness

After you left
I swam on my back
watching the spider web clouds
break up in the deepening sky,
or maybe coalescing,
crystal seeding itself in ice,
or child’s hair in wind.
For a while I could taste the cut grass
from the playing field,
then the rubber chair of the lifeguard,
and the wet soap smell
of the other woman in my lane.
With each breath an open mouth
of surprises, of someone else,
I watched the sky and the evening,
now unpatterned lace,
brittle, fair and random, cloth of heaven,
and the colored flags
as they moved into sight
always five strokes away from the wall.
I found the moon, too,
less than half crescent,
in the western nightfall,
right where we agreed
it would be.