Blind Swimmer, The

for Thomas Lux

We know he's out there,

swimming slowly, searching for corners

in the sea where the dark has rubbed away.

Each breath he takes takes him deeper

inside his mind where voices without sources

scream "Swim!" and even the ocean

is missing. Still, he swims.

The water fills his cupped hands

like breasts, the one constant in a crowd

of waves pushing him nowhere, the blue

salt glued to his eyes like braille.

What do his dead eyes say?

The body that keeps him buoyant is a room,

the pain would stop if he just walked out?

On the shore, our feet planted like roots,

we watch for a sign. Some of us yell

at anything: a wounded dolphin breaking

into air, the torn edge of a fin

mistaken for his hand. The ocean doesn't

stand for our common life, what makes us

need one another, but we still fear

drowning. So, safely together,

we wait for the blind swimmer

to walk out of the sea and say it's all right,

you can swim alone without seeing.

Some of us wait a long time.

I know he's out there.

he smells the ocean, doesn't he, that old

naked woman? She takes his tongue

in her mouth, doesn't her mouth open?

I hear him going under,

quietly as memory enters dreams, his dream

nothing I can imagine, tasting water so deep,

light is terrible and fish see through their skin.

Copyright World Poetry, Incorporated Mar/Apr 2004
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved