When I was six I used to try to walk on water.
I stood at the edge of my backyard pool
Taunting the sun to sear my baby-smooth skin
If it could
Before I dove back into the embrace of my watery fortress,
The surface exploding on impact,
Shattering the hateful sunlight into mere ripples,
Making monochromatic stained glass at ten feet deep,
And letting me into the womblike stronghold, safely whole.
We’d swim and play until our fingers were raisins and our
mouths were cottonballs,
Pulling our hair backwards over our faces and flipping it,
George Washington, Sir, we’d giggle
at the sight of each other’s dripping wigs,
Presidents of the child-sized Atlantis so chlorinated that
the only things left living to govern were the frogs that we deported across
our brick-lined borders
And the mosquitos that built their burial mounds on our
bodies in the process.
My pool was
a cerulean playground for the mad scientists of physics and
faith,
And I figured,
That if I ran fast enough across the water’s wind-hacked
surface
Then I too might reach God,
Or at least middle earth.
I know He scrawled nature’s laws upon our cells and set us
in motion,
But I thought rules were meant to be broken,
Instead, every time the rule of law upheld and
the water broke under my feet,
Giving birth
to a Fall,
a hard fall
Feet first and always caught by surprise
and only a cool baptism in childlike resilience to soften
the blow,
in the name of the father, and of the son,
and of the pure hearted spirit of my six-year-old self…
I think I needed to believe that belief wasn’t confined to
never-never land—
In the impending inevitability
of grown-uptitude.
Damn.
I always hated Peter Pan.
