The Float

SHARON OLDS

A Commanding Officer, after The War,
had given it to someone’s father, who had
anchored it in the lake, a square
aluminum pontoon, seamed with solder.
I was a little post-industrial
water rat in a one-piece suit with the
Blue Willow pattern from a dinner plate on it,
the man on the left nipple going
away forever, the woman on the right
forever waiting. I would dive into the lake
—immediate, its cobalt reach and
silence—slide back down into the rich,
closed, icy book, blue-lipped
in a white rubber cabbage-roses
headdress, and a coral rubber nose-clip,
slow-flitting like an agate-eating
swallow. I had no friends, I had
no breasts, I had no diary, I was oddly
complete. I was the editor of a small newspaper,
and its reporter, too, and junior reporter,
food columnist floating sideways in the
indigo pressure. The grown-ups said
we must not, swim, under, the float,
we might get tangled in the anchor chain, I
swam under the float, and saw
the slant of the chain, mottled eel.
And you must never go up, under the raft, to its
recessed chamber where there’s poison ether.
I would soar supine on my back, looking up
at the bulk, I’d rush up slowly closer
to the anti-life, holding my breath,
finally dipping up into it,
putting my face up into it—
dark, gummy, green—shove down
and water-sprint for home. But of course
I felt I had to inhale that stuff
and live. I left no note, the woman on my
right chest would always love
the man on my left, and never have him, I
came up between those boilerplated
bulges and breathed. It was more an unguent
than air, it smelled like myrrh gone bad,
I’d go and sip it up all summer,
and live. Sip, sip, sip,
first the left, then the right
nipple faintly puffed, almost
greenish with silvery newness, the lover
on the left pushed out his mouth, and on the right
she puckered hers—if they grew enough,
they could kiss, or some resuscitator could be
begged to give them mouth to mouth to mouth.


(Excerpted from Brick 80, used by permission of the author)