Assumptions
She hadn't said
that she couldn't swim.
When asked if she snorkelled
she'd said yes. They'd
set off through the lagoon
to the white rim.
Sun shone on tanned backs,
winked on wave's tilt,
sent its bending lines like radar
onto turtles, conches and coral trout
and they'd waved
with large underwater hands
just as
her snorkel snapped
off and floated from the grip of stretched fingers,
then sank.
He turned for another
and couldn't grasp why
she was low in the water
with mouth to the sky
and didn't talk when asked
but gasped
as the water drained from her face
like grey stone.
His snorkel jammed in
she swallowed and came back
to the good-luck turtles,
flopped weakly
on the sloping sand.
Years later, her daughter
couldn't wait to climb trees like Mowgli,
ran on to an arm of beech
leant tenderly down.
It eased her up to the thick trunk
where she slipped
from the height of a ceiling
onto her head,
bent back till her neck did a u
and saw for the first time
behind herself.
He saw altered years,
thin limbs in a wheel chair
long after
she'd stood and cried.
At times memories stray into meetings.
He finds them in streets
like man-holes uncovered,
enough to run his hands
gingerly along each rim,
sense how deep the pit,
after a fall how the sky
is never the same.
Colin
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