Читать книгу Long after Lauds - Jeanine Hathaway - Страница 16

Late, the swimmer flips from the board into the diving well

as the Country Kissin’ radio blares: This is the moment

you’ve been waiting for. Not knowing she was supposed

to wait, she kicks, sounds, clicks like a beluga.

Never at home on the surface, she wriggles,

rubs her cap-knobbed head on the drain grate

12 feet down. Goggle-eyed, she stretches

the length of her white body extending back

epochs when the breathless elders’ stubby legs stumped up

onto their arctic beach; when lolling in air, blowholes

sandy, the whole pod flipped and sang till—oh!—the life

guard blows the whistle. Out of time. She has to return

to the radio, leaping across stations, picking up sound waves,

grace notes, off; a fluke then, the unexpected depths of silence,

another moment she hadn’t known she was waiting for.