It’s Lara’s last day at the residency
and the grounds are almost empty. The other artists
are probably hunched over desks
or easels under fluorescent lights. Two poets,
we tell ourselves we’re always writing,
even when we’re not writing writing—
which allows us to drink every noon, gulp the mini-
tequilas and whiskies her husband gave her
for advent, hitchhike to Sweet Briar Lake
where today she offers to teach me how to
swim, or float—clearly, I can’t do either.
And she is a good swimmer, Lara. On weekends,
her dad would carry her and her brother at 5am
from their beds to the car, drive almost three hours
down to Assateague—that’s how much water healed him
after her mother left. After breastfeeding
her daughters, Lara’s boobs never shrunk back,
which is why she can float as well as she does—
motherhood keeps her afloat, literally.
I know what she means, though it’s hard
to take her seriously with her polychrome
goggles, the dragonflies having a field day
seeing themselves in her eyes. Lara says they probably
think she is Freya, Norse goddess of dragonflies,
lust, and fertility. When I try to see myself
in her gaze, I can’t. Besides, I already know
what I look like: graceless, flapping my way in the water,
trying not to sink. Lara explains it’s my own
weightlessness that exhausts me. She’s probably right;
I’m all skin and breastbones and I miss my body,
my curves. The pounds the depression had taken away
all those months I’ve struggled to separate
love from compatibility. Lara is gentle with me,
says to lean back, lower my ears into the water.
I need to find my center point and breathe into it. I let myself drift
on the steadiness of her instructions
for a whole minute before I lose my hold.
We splash our way back to the dock
where she tells me she had a really good Jewish friend
growing up, and what’s that thing you say
in the all-women’s water? She means Mikveh, I think,
but I’m not that kind of Jewish. I’ve only been once,
before my wedding. All I remember is the attendant,
a Yemenite woman and blind in one eye,
peeling loose strands of hair off my back so I can be dirt-free
for my new life with my husband, clean of what
my own body makes. Lara asks, do you mind
if I get naked here? She’d given back her room key
and needs to change before driving home to DC. I don’t
and her swimsuit thuds against the wood,
heavy with lake water. She asks what I’m writing about
but goes on to answer the question, which makes me
feel relieved. She’s writing about Demeter,
the deuteragonist of the story, the de-centered one.
For years, she could only see herself as the daughter,
Persephone: her mother gone, her sex drive steering
the story, driving her toward all kinds of men
from hell. But now she’s almost fifty and nobody’s
daughter. When she’s with her girls, she feels uneasy
seeing herself in their gait, their shrugs. It’s alarming
to know that the story, its center, had shifted. I want to ask her about
the pomegranate but here, we’re up close and I can’t
take her seriously: naked except for her Norse goddess
goggles. To think I couldn’t see myself in her face,
that I was an apparition. Now there are two of me
in each prismatic eye. I’m impossible not to see.