by Jill Moffett

The current was persistent, strings of water
snaked around our limbs like sea ropes on
Pirate ships. My instincts proved faulty—here
you leave your legs silent: kick and you'll swim

Still. In the Valley, I thought I'd found
a homeland: it was actually a trick of geography
nestled deep in the belly of Ontario. I was born
Here, two hundred kilometres close to granite
smells and rapids and rock

meeting rock in secret crevices.
some memories can be imagined, dust this
as a homecoming to a home I never lived in
with a lover never mine, a furious
exercise in vicarious living—and

             as his fingers gripped my wrist with
             slow urgency, wrestling the churn of water
             from my lungs, peeling back my skin

             from water-shrouded obstacles, when
             I felt the sting of a scraped knee
             in water he knew as well as his own breathing
             or his own blood;

                          what rattles through your brain is how,

for so many years you hid from gummy
pines, relishing instead the glossy
feel of book covers, hiding in their
echoes, propelling your body forward
with will and muscles

believing that laps in a swimming pool
translate as distance.

For weeks afterwards, my limbs, limbs dreamt the
phantom pull of undertow. Bus sounds seeped
through urban window panes, standing in for
the beauty and the permanence of
uncut water smashing immobile rock.

Source: Headlight Anthology, no. 1, 1998, pp. 84–85.