| Skinny-dipping by Ed Skoog | ||
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The water we swam in was dark and deep, chunked with debris from spring floods, and held our bodies like airplane wreckage sheared away and fallen and forgotten. Far from town, the pond surrounded itself with trees and the reflection of trees. Busts of ourselves, we bobbed because to swim would be to return to shore, our shirts and sandals that carried us over sharp rocks cattle refused to pass. Absolutely where I wanted to be I kicked closer to where she treaded water until it seemed wiser to tread together. Faces that stare from walls, stone yawns rain pours through, are always on the verge of saying what I wanted her to say and she may have wanted to hear. Then winter was a third-hour bell and the clank of old pipes behind walls. After school before parents clocked home we discovered a world under covers, what we were and how to use it, the new look. The slow build of those moments calls for my flesh to follow every day, as ruins beg for the fire that first burned them, as reconstructed fossils ache for skin, or swimmers leave land and sometimes drown. _________________________________________________________________________ |
