Swimming

Abstract

Swimming Jeremy Paden (bio) I stood beside the ambulance still swimmingthrough the grey Michigan waves. When the copasked for my info, I mumbled an addressone address ago, stopped, corrected myself;then flustered and breathless gave my wife's number,a number I'd thought forgotten now that allI do is press her name when I want to call.Midway through, I stopped again and gave him mine. He looked at me and asked, You sure? Yes, I said.And tried to catch my breath, to reel my mindback in, mind that still swam toward the man, worriedwe'd both drown, that still went over those lessonsin that Caribbean cove where I would swimpast the breakers, then dive down to touch bottom,where dad would have us swim up behind himand drag him back to shore through choppy surf. When the ambulance left, I sat on the beachand watched the horizon, still swimming. That night,I chopped and sautéed onions for dinner,all the while swimming, swimming to reach him.His absent eyes bobbed just above the water.I slid my arm under his pit, acrosshis chest, his body rested on my hips.The waves washed over us. They pulled us down. A limp man weighs much more than a fathertrying to teach his son to save a life.I left him on the shore, left him to the careof others and then collapsed. He called after [End Page 32] dinner to talk. His wife and her sistershad gone to town to shop, while the guysand kids had gone to swim one last time,one last swim before the end of vacation. Two days later, back at home, he called againto tell me once more all he knew; to ask,again, what I had done. Unable to freehimself from the undertow, his mind still trappedin a body that couldn't touch bottom.All he remembered was mumbling a prayerand giving up. How, when he had a wifeand daughter, could he have fought so little? He said he saw Jesus swimming to himthrough the waves and then, spent, he passed out.How did I reach him when his wife's brotherscould not? Days later and he was still caught.I told him of when a car ran a light,broadsided me, crushed my ribs, bruised my brain.How months later at stoplights a glint of sunoff windows in my peripheral vision would make me cry, strip all strength from my legs,so they could not accelerate the car,told him how the headaches and short temperlasted for years, how only recentlyI had begun to venture again into the sunwithout glasses. But there I was, on the shoreof Lake Michigan playing with my children,catching waves whipped up by some western storm. My wreck and my survival was dumb chance.That he and I were at that beach, coincidence. [End Page 33] Life is a matter of fractions, accidents.It was luck that knew how to swim through surf,luck that pulled a drowning man back to shore.We want the intervention to be more;we want God, but get tired, troubled angelsswimming to reach us through the cold, grey waves. [End Page 34] Jeremy Paden Jeremy Paden was raised in Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and the Dominican Republic. He is a poet, translator, and professor of Latin American literature at Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky. He is the author of four collections of poems. Among these, ruina montium, about the 2010 Chilean mine collapse, has been published in both English (Broadstone Books, 2016) and Spanish (Valparaíso, 2018). He is also the translator for various poets from Argentina, Chile, Colombia, and Spain. Copyright © 2022 Berea College