Hold your breath.
I failed a swimming test trying to touch the bottom of the deep end.
The swim instructor focused my breathing and rubbed my back.
“Ssssshhhhhh—it’s okay.
You can breathe now.
You can breathe now.
Take a deeeeeeeep breath.”
This is where you breathe.
5 years ago, my father died– a tidal wave that
rippled more like bath water than tsunami–
My life shifted like the shallow waves of turquoise,
rocking with my rib cage in a porcelain tub.
Hold your breath.
Like every good fisherman, you get sea legs.
You don’t notice the rocking of the boat.
When you step on land, it is foreign.
To watch a chest rise and fall, beckon its
crashing only for relief from its wake–
the way each breath would smash the boat,
toss it like a toy in bathwater–
to have that constant motion–
and to step on land.
The thrashing of the ocean become more familiar
than the solid of earth beneath feet.
This is where you breathe.
I tell how my father died
the same way you’d read off a train schedule.
I’ve learned to cast worm-less hooks,
and prepare for no bites.
After 5 years,
the tsunami breached the levies.
Hold your breath.
My father rested in the metal bed in the living room, overlooking his lake.
He wore dignity, plaid short-sleeved shirt, and khaki shorts
until standing to change was a daily root canal
he felt inside his femur.
The weight of his pregnant belly buckled his knees,
and humility flooded him quickly.
His eyes told me he’d wished he’d gone “easy”–
a grabber like his best friend,
a sleeper like my friend’s OD,
a tangled soup of metal and gas like his brother-in-law.
This is where you breathe.
We watched the horizon,
didn’t pay attention to our course.
A sinkhole drained our 6-month voyage into 11 days.
Seven days later, his hands fell by his side
when he asked me to help him brush his teeth.
I felt the tide rise past my toes.
Hold your breath.
Mortality is stubborn.
This is where you breathe
34 hours later, what I knew of the scientist,
the baseball pitcher,
the PBR-drinking, dirty-talking, lanky-quiet man
who taught me to fish
and play HORSE,
had gone–
but the leg of a starfish, the half of an earthworm,
the snail out of its shell –
still yelped for its other half.
for 16 hours he called every 10 seconds for jesus to save him.
8 hours with words–the rest came in whelps,
like the bobbing of a drowning anchor.
Hold your breath
It is easy to forget that we BREATHE
without thinking,
that we SWALLOW
without thinking.
By the 12th gestational week, a fetus can swallow.
There are 13 phases and it takes 25 muscles.
It’s also one of the most complex actions for a body to complete,
and one of the first to fail.
I watched nature reverse human into instinct,
from man into notion.
When I asked him to stop shaking as I squeezed the dropper of liquid morphine into his cheek–
maybe I was pleading for him to go,
maybe I thought his inversion to afterthought was here,
maybe his unfocused blue eyes were really searching for my blurry face,
to say “stop–not yet!”
Maybe I could still see a bit of him coming to the surface,
maybe that’s when I heard the gurgling in his throat,
as I realized I was drowning him with the morphine.
This is where you breathe.
He was this moving thing, this palor, this sweaty chest
that snapped up like cat in the air and fell like an oak leaf,
with the eyes like a Maine morning’s tide–grey and unapologetic–
the same tint of a wave cresting in response to some seemingly small underwater earthquake.
In the morning, he was a fish out of water.
My hand reached out to steady the fish on the line.
Said, “it’s okay. You can go now.”
Hold your breath.
Mortality is stubborn.
This is where you breathe.
When the chest fails to rise again–
you are not wishing for waves—
you are kissing the shores.
You are watching the boat leave you in the distance.
You are remembering almost drowning in 2nd grade, gasping for clarity of lungs…
gasping for expansion of ribs.
There was such silence at the bottom of that pool.
You want to forget this, because HERE–
NOW—
you want there to be music and you want there to be some movie-style-ending,
but you DON’T want it to be some stupid fucking Tuesday morning.
Hold your breath.
And you are pushing out your lungs,
holding your own breath as if to save the air for him,
as if you are taking too much that you don’t deserve,
as if last night, you thought you were throwing him a life preserver,
but you were dropping the anchor down his throat.
This is where you breathe.
And you are begging the end of the breastplate’s magnetic pull to the ceiling,
the positive and negative pinching between the spreading of ribs,
The swell and retreat of oxygen–
This is where you breathe.
You want to end the suffering of the fish,
Take it off its hook,
Throw it back into the ocean.
Let it slip into the calm,
let it float with the rocking of the swell–
And
Then
there is silence.
And, still, the only thing you can think is…
This is where you breathe now….
This is where you breathe now….
This is where you breathe now….
This is where you….
