Shirts or Skins, a 2014 poetry chapbook by Jim Redmond

Vanishing Point

If this whole
Memory—warm
backwash re-
furbished, made pure
steel as cold
and struck hard
as canned lightning.
Some straight
unbendable line

I could put
a tuning fork to.
That single note
like the slow dive
of a cormorant
could carry
me down
to when I was

a boy and almost
drowned in the pool.
A weightlessness
not of my own
nature, but from
the water’s.
I will never know
again what I knew
then: my body,
tight fist of a lotus
blossoming inward.

 

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