At seventy, the final thing she wanted
to learn was to dive:
to tuck her chin to her chest, between
her outstretched arms and to fall
headfirst toward the bottom she had both
feared and yearned for since she had
first seen water—the still pool
untouched, unrippled, heavy with meaning
and promise: to feel its cool caress, hear
the bubbles of breath leave her body, see
the illusion of being enclosed utterly by blue;
to know that she could aim her body down,
then up, and it would joyously comply,
her remaining breath buoying her up, up,
up to break the surface of the old familiar
world as if rising from sleep; it was something
like flying, she thought, something like
taking off from one medium and trying on
another, shedding one set of rules for a second:
one which both frightened and enthralled,
a kind of life to which we are not naturally born,
but on the edge of which we are forever poised.
