Dive
By
They think that it’s mostly about water and impact
when they see me step to the edge of the platform.
I say, yes, these are important. Here I am nearly
naked and shaved down, hairs just beginning to
peek through skin again. All for the sake of sleekness.
For blue burrowing. But that’s just the conclusion, and
really it is about air and descent. You do not see me
turn about in the pool. Piscine. Currents committing
hara-kiri over a smooth body. What you must pay
attention to is the artistry of the first three seconds.
Hesitation and resolve painting the face. The first
bounce. Outstretched arms and the breath,
gathered up and put in the lung baskets. Moment
of momentum, where inertia takes me in its tentacles.
I fold forward into the empty smell of chlorine.
It’s about transformation: into a capital Gamma, into
a gyroscope. It’s about speed. It’s about humanity,
so obsessed with the fall, and how we who jump
recapture its grace. Midair. And the water is simply
the shock of reality, leering at us from the bottom.
Stone Fruit
Wild cherries then had always been anything but cherries
when we found them tumbled on the crooked brown path.
So much of our lives are summed up by bits of crimson,
spherical, soft to the touch, dropped from overhead branches
by the unseen gods and goddesses of cherry wood. You could
drape a double stem over your ear, and suddenly
it was seventeenth-century Poitiers where such things were
Highly Fashionable (voolay voo dansay madam?).
Tugged between two teeth, the stem discarded, it became
a missile to hurl at the opposing camp, huddled low
in their dismal trenches. Bombs blossomed with red pulp:
pebble bullets popped freely from their wounds but left
scarlet comet trails down mother-pressed tee-shirts.
And if you found a fat and purple loner of a specimen,
you would burst it with your thumb against one closed eye,
make the sacrifice of Odin for the wisdom of the world.
(And of course we’d never heard of him; but we loved to see
his vitreous finale.) We colored the pond red that summer,
spitting the pits as far as we could, red trailing ghoulishly from
red gums lining laughing red smiles. We ran shrieking
when the bees droned in our direction. When the sun
touched the water, the mosquitoes would rise in lazy circles,
and we would smack them in pinprick smears of blood.
What it really was, before the last tang of sour sweetness
vanished from the tongue, was an outsideness of time and
a well-deep dream, gathered into something impossibly round
which we would swallow, to not understand, and to be content.
Great works. Keep the fire burning!
Hi Gabriel, I am not laying down my pen 'till I live fully and die empty. In projecting Ghana and Africa as a continent, let the pen be our tongue and as a strong magnet of warfare. Thanks good friend
Hi Michael Poets are who they are, I love the 4th stanza. Especially this part. ‘Coz I have one life, one breath, passionately, to do poetry”. Oneal
Thanks Oneal, Poets have an insightful zeal and as prophets, I guess our language must sought to teach beauty and all the natural sense of our living. Thanks Oneal and OW News for the drive and opportunities offered moi.
Michael‘s poem is splendid! Just love that style.
Thanks Giff Ford, I am grateful for the warm comment and appreciating my piece. Your message soothes my soul 'coz it was posted on the exact day of my birth.
The kinesthetic wisdom of "dive" comes at me from the p.o.v. of the watched as well as the watcher. Also, the act inarguable meaning, the specifics of which can be debated. Not all poets can transform acts as physical as the dive, with the physical manipulation of the body to prepare for the dive, into paeans to aesthetics and significance. 9.9!!
Thanks Ronald Fischman, Wow.... In-depth language thought. Thanks for the compliments and the high score 9.9. Stunning! It makes me wanna write more. Stay blessed and please do read more of me