Open Water

Abstract

Open Water Ada Limón (bio) It does no good to trick and weave and losethe other ghosts, to shove the buried deeperinto the sandy loam, the riverine silt, still you come,my faithful one, the sound of a body so persistentin water I cannot tell if it is a wave or youmoving through waves. A month before you diedyou wrote a letter to old friends saying you swamwith a pod of dolphins in open water, saying goodbye,but what you told me most about was the eye.That enormous reckoning eye of an unknown fishthat passed you during that last-ditch defiant swim.On the shore, you described the fish as nothingyou'd seen before, a blue-gray behemoth moving slowlyand enduringly through its deep fathomlessNorth Pacific waters. That night, I heard moreabout that fish and that eye than anything else.I don't know why it has come to me this morning.Warm rain and landlocked, I don't deserve the image.But I keep thinking how something saw you, somethingwas bearing witness to you out there in the oceanwhere you were no one's mother, and no one's wife,but you in your original skin, right before you died,you were beheld, and today in my kitchen with younow ten years gone, I was so happy for you. [End Page 120] Ada Limón Ada Limón is the author of five books of poetry, including The Carrying (Milkweed Editions, 2018), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her fourth book, Bright Dead Things (Milkweed Editions, 2015), was named a finalist for the National Book Award, the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Copyright © 2021 Middlebury College