First Swim

Brandy drip intoxication. Some legion away I see the rocks and remember it was about this time last year when memories were formed. They coagulated like mozzerella cheese under enyzymatic influence, curds carefully forming within my fingertips like clouds on a mission to reform the tapestry of the sky. Across the lake are the rocks on which I sat and contemplated ulterior possibility, the possibility of which had never felt real until two people with bicycles thought it was, and then it was almost as if it was. The water refrains from being room temperature despite the sudden deck-card fall of warm days preceding it, but I slide close to shore and dip a hand into something as hot as urine. It is not until about ten minutes out (some floursecent bikini on the dock belies my undercover nature during this illicit activity) that I smell the lake, and everything flows back in carotid waves. I miss that blood, the taste and smell of it, now like some lost opportunity snowed over and in the spring, last winter's remnants remaining like dead leaves, still wet and preserved in blocks of ice, unwanted, distateful in the shock-white light of new spring. My skin was never as eggshell white as when I looked at those leaves, two albino pidgeons in Kansas. Like some Neitzchean revelry, I come to the conclusion that Saturday afternoons are best spent listening to (not waiting for) trains passing lakeside, a reed strewn shore beveling a wire fence and a signed marked "warning" in muddy orange and black, unobtainable except by the few willing to cross the entire lake, a promontory of granite just large enough for sitting and sought so occasionally that they carry memories the way rocks weight debris on the bottom of the lake, a sink for particles, properties, and memories waiting to be tapped by the unsuspecting bather.