always haunted me, even in sleep.
As a child I had nightmares of tsunamis
or swimming the Australian crawl
up the back roads after school.
Yeah, most people have flying dreams.
Mine were always couched in subliminal terms,
stranded somewhere between air and water.
When the tsunamis engulfed me,
I discovered I could breathe underwater.
Sometimes my safety raft was a shoe, the flat, girly kind.
I was too young to read symbolism into my dreams,
but I loved merging with the elements,
in the bathtub where everything was fish-eyed,
but after I nearly drowned, my grandmother dragged me
down the road to Barbano's salt water pool,
at 25 cents a lesson. I was an 8-bit swimmer.
That summer, I circled neighborhood pools
seeking a baptism between air and water.
I gawped at pools, slipping in when no one was looking.
When I took to snorkeling, in the tropics,
I couldn’t get enough of that underworld realm
where the sky and sun were distant wavery thoughts,
the world I inhabited was painted anew.
Did Monet think about Ondine’s slippery realm
as he painted canvases of waterlilies
large enough to fill the imagination?
2/2/24 Molly Fisk’s Poem a Day
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