We were sun-wrecked and itching to go back
from lunch into the green lakewater, when
the lifeguards screeched their whistles over
and over and we looked up to see them waving
everyone out. Calm, fatalistic, Protestant, you
bear with me when I tell this story every few
years, nod, shake your head, tell me, Go on.
My mother demanded we come to her and so we sat,
watched the pool go lifeless while a big woman
screamed and pointed there and there and again
there at ripples under the high dive until it became
clear her kid was missing. Five decades later I fear
it’s true: Someone’s always missing. This time
I don’t describe for you each scenario I’ve dreamed
and told too often. One may be right there, around
the corner, or may be hiding, counting seconds
in his room, the shades down, the lights off,
the clock and phone cords pulled from their sockets.
Or another may have taken off in the pitch inhalation
of 2AM so no one will sense her empty bed, or
she may be missing in the altogether breathless
way that surges like adrenaline, the cop on duty
not picking up the phone that hasn’t yet rung,
can’t ring because the fathers or wives or roommates
can’t bring themselves to dial, can’t enter the phase
in which to call is to admit belief. Some nights
my trouble is, I can’t escape the incoming silence
of alarms that tell me I should believe in something
other than the pulse knifing my temple. After
my mother huddled us onto the blanket
in the branching shadows, I kept waiting for her
to say it was time to pack, head home, we have to go,
now. But she sat, rapt, peering at the ripples
for minute after howling minute. The year before,
as we ate after-school snacks, she’d hung up the phone
too slowly, her face literally gnarling with grief
and rage when she dragged us into the living room,
then made us kneel at the coffee table, the rosary
vibrating in her bloodless hands. You say, for some,
prayer’s a comfort, a means. Soon enough,
three lifeguards with thick rope hoisted the body─
its awful white─up the wall where they performed
the useless rituals of respiration. Why did she need
to watch? You take my hand, tell me my mother
was a driven woman, so righteous even god
would think twice before talking back to her.
Tonight she too is among the missing.
I can’t shake her last skeletal image when
the screen in the cancer ward flat-lined. Bodies
float to the surface. I squeeze your hand, hold on
to what it is I have. Outside, closing in─the dark,
the wind, the ceaseless, invisible gatherings.