Swimming

for Marilyn

• My old friend and I step down into the pool’s warm
• chlorinated water, no longer thin, dark-haired girls
• as when we met. We push out into the lap lanes
• in our women’s bodies. Her hair, once chestnut,
• to her waist, is cropped, completely white; mine is mostly gray.
• We have survived womanhood, the scars hidden
• underneath our swimsuits: she has only one breast,
• like an Amazon; I have empty space where my female organs were.
• We swim slowly, inexpertly, without husbands or children,
• as we were that summer night in Kansas City, with Ken and Bob
• at the Jewel Box, our first female-impersonators’ bar,
• and the Blue Room, our first black bar, drinking
• Singapore slings and sloe gin fizzes, staying up all night
• and going swimming in our underwear at 4 a.m.
• in a lake in Kansas. We built a fire on the shore,
• and I told Bob he looked like Stephen Dedalus
• in Portrait of the Artist, in the scene of his epiphany
• on the beach. I’ve always liked to think I saved our lives
• later, on the turnpike, by waking Ken when he dozed off
• behind the wheel. Now, still young, he and Bob are dead of AIDS,
• deaths none of us then could have imagined.
• Old friends, we swim our slow, unathletic laps. We were
• intense, emotional girls. We believed
• that art made life worth living, and it does. We thought that life
• would give us everything, and it has.
• We are still burning, plunging through the pool’s bright surface,
• buoyant in the sweet and bitter water.

Carolyn Miller is a San Francisco poet, editor and painter who leads poetry-writing workshops in both France and the Bay Area. The poem “Swimming” is from Carolyn Miller’s collection After Cocteau, published by Sixteen Rivers Press, and is reprinted with permission.