swimming

This in-between holiday week, our unstated goal has been to swim twice a day — in the midday hard heat and in the dusky evening, when the surface of the water holds warmth and our feet trail into the cooler eddies beneath.

We’re drinking our fill of milkweed blossoms, the reflection of clouds in rippling ponds, ice cream cones — as if this stockpiling might carry into the white and gray palette of Vermont’s winter.

I wonder what became of
purity. The world is a
complex fatigue….
(The geranium flowers) are clusters of richness
held against the night in quiet
exultation, five on each branch,
upraised. I bought it myself
and gave it to my young wife
years ago, in a plastic cup
with a 19cent seedling
from the supermarket, now
so thick, leathery-stemmed,
and bountiful with blossom.

— Hayden Carruth, “August First”

Hardwick, Vermont

We rowed to the middle of Caspian Lake today, myself sprawled over the keel of the small wooden boat, the little child kneeling beside me. The older daughter welding the oars demanded, What are we doing?

I said, We’re hanging between the water and the sky today.

In the lake’s center, waves lapped against the boat, the oars clunked in their metal locks, a gull flapped by without a feather-whoosh of sound. I dove in, the water so clear I saw my kicking feet brushing all that water below, then raised my arms into the sky, an infinity of luminous blue broken with troubled storm clouds. Cool and sweet, the lake was fragrant as fields of growing hay.

Glory be to God for dappled things…

Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough;

And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;

Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)

With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;

He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change: Praise him.

– Gerard Manley Hopkins, “Pied Beauty”