It was a game my father taught me,
to pass the time on hot summer afternoons
when the air was thicker than the water.
The secret he said was to close your eyes
and listen to your heartbeat
as it pounded out its jagged rhythm in your chest,
as the water closed over you
and your lungs grew deliciously tight.
For hours I would practice, gauging my success
by the hands of an old clock.
Summers blur together, like the distorted mosaic tiles
at the bottom of the pool, that I sometimes counted when
I couldn’t bear to keep my eyes shut.
I imagined that if I practiced long enough
there would come a day when the burning in my lungs
would peak and then stop—when I would open my eyes
and find that I could stay under indefinitely.
This childish fantasy melted under the scorching heat,
and the game was just that—a game.
Sometimes I still wonder what it would be like
to stay under and never come back up.
I know now that the burning would stop,
but not for the reasons I imagined in my childhood fantasies.
Still, sometimes when I’m under and my heart beats so loudly
I can’t hear myself think, and I open my eyes and everything is shimmering
and waving, I imagine that the hands on the old clock have stopped
their ceaseless ticking, and that I am existing in a separate time, and I close my eyes again
and I stay. Indefinitely.