Swimmer

I remember her first as a swimmer:

I saw my mother swimming, her arms reaching out

across giant ocean waves,

swimming through the breakers of the Atlantic.

I stood on the shore,

knowing almost nothing, unable to go to her

- dumbfounded by the wonder of it.

It was long before I could dress myself,

I was a little older than the weeping Chinese child

sitting alone in the rubble of the Nanking bombing

-barely old enough to be read to,

not able to tell time or count.

When I had that kind of knowledge, in her old age

she showed me herself naked, the tubes and the sack

-an hour later she said, "I must have been crazy."

Then she swam off again and never came back.

Despite the skills I had learned

reaching out across dreams of death,

for a few days I was that child again.

Now I have learned a kind of independence,

it is mostly in dreams she comes back, younger or

older,

sometimes fresh from the joy of the swim.