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Swimming
Carolyn Miller (photo by Michael O'Shea)
for Marilyn
- My old friend and I step down into the pool’s warm
- chlorinated water, no longer thin, dark-haired girls
- as when we met. We push out into the lap lanes
- in our women’s bodies. Her hair, once chestnut,
- to her waist, is cropped, completely white; mine is mostly gray.
- We have survived womanhood, the scars hidden
- underneath our swimsuits: she has only one breast,
- like an Amazon; I have empty space where my female organs were.
- We swim slowly, inexpertly, without husbands or children,
- as we were that summer night in Kansas City, with Ken and Bob
- at the Jewel Box, our first female-impersonators’ bar,
- and the Blue Room, our first black bar, drinking
- Singapore slings and sloe gin fizzes, staying up all night
- and going swimming in our underwear at 4 a.m.
- in a lake in Kansas. We built a fire on the shore,
- and I told Bob he looked like Stephen Dedalus
- in Portrait of the Artist, in the scene of his epiphany
- on the beach. I’ve always liked to think I saved our lives
- later, on the turnpike, by waking Ken when he dozed off
- behind the wheel. Now, still young, he and Bob are dead of AIDS,
- deaths none of us then could have imagined.
- Old friends, we swim our slow, unathletic laps. We were
- intense, emotional girls. We believed
- that art made life worth living, and it does. We thought that life
- would give us everything, and it has.
- We are still burning, plunging through the pool’s bright surface,
- buoyant in the sweet and bitter water.
Carolyn Miller is a San Francisco poet, editor and painter who leads poetry-writing workshops in both France and the Bay Area. The poem “Swimming” is from Carolyn Miller’s collection After Cocteau, published by Sixteen Rivers Press, and is reprinted with permission.
Here's something you might be interested in.
Swimming
Swimming
Carolyn Miller (photo by Michael O'Shea)
for Marilyn
- My old friend and I step down into the pool’s warm
- chlorinated water, no longer thin, dark-haired girls
- as when we met. We push out into the lap lanes
- in our women’s bodies. Her hair, once chestnut,
- to her waist, is cropped, completely white; mine is mostly gray.
- We have survived womanhood, the scars hidden
- underneath our swimsuits: she has only one breast,
- like an Amazon; I have empty space where my female organs were.
- We swim slowly, inexpertly, without husbands or children,
- as we were that summer night in Kansas City, with Ken and Bob
- at the Jewel Box, our first female-impersonators’ bar,
- and the Blue Room, our first black bar, drinking
- Singapore slings and sloe gin fizzes, staying up all night
- and going swimming in our underwear at 4 a.m.
- in a lake in Kansas. We built a fire on the shore,
- and I told Bob he looked like Stephen Dedalus
- in Portrait of the Artist, in the scene of his epiphany
- on the beach. I’ve always liked to think I saved our lives
- later, on the turnpike, by waking Ken when he dozed off
- behind the wheel. Now, still young, he and Bob are dead of AIDS,
- deaths none of us then could have imagined.
- Old friends, we swim our slow, unathletic laps. We were
- intense, emotional girls. We believed
- that art made life worth living, and it does. We thought that life
- would give us everything, and it has.
- We are still burning, plunging through the pool’s bright surface,
- buoyant in the sweet and bitter water.
Carolyn Miller is a San Francisco poet, editor and painter who leads poetry-writing workshops in both France and the Bay Area. The poem “Swimming” is from Carolyn Miller’s collection After Cocteau, published by Sixteen Rivers Press, and is reprinted with permission.
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