The Swimmer

            By Michael
Collier

            
               (posted Wednesday, Aug.
12, 1998)
            

            To hear the poet read "The
Swimmer," click .

            Nothing like him in Bosch
or Breugel, nothing so denatured as to resemblenot a semblance of a human
facebut the substance of some form made and then unmade, or like a lump of
human butter excavated from a bog.

            His eyes askew, aligned by
a jagged axis that must have balanced once across the fulcrum of his nose. The
pupils deep and lost but ever seeinglike water in a well at night. The head
misshapen like a too-ripe

            melon, dimpled by the
forceps mark of his accident or whatever extracted him from normalcy, dipped
him in the searing, crushing waters of disfigurement and then returned himto
the world to fill it with the childish

            worrying sound working its
way from his mouth that's not so much a mouthas a coin purse cinched tight,
sewnwith the fragments of his lips--the yipping gait of breathlessness he
makes, which makes no sense

            without the fluttering
exuberance of his hands that come to rest, delicately, on my shoulders, as if
to say: "Help tie the drawstring of my suit, shoulder my towel, fit these
sandals to my feet and lead me to the pool

            where you
will see how struggling to be what I am, I become--otter, seal,
dolphin--released from myself, though not absolved, not ever able to hide the
fin or the fluke, my feet webbed and unwebbed."