The Cold Spring Pond

1.

My mother tells me it’s against the law
to pick, or even touch a Cardinal Flower.
My father nods his solemn imprimatur. 

Across the pond along the weedy shore,
clusters of deep red florets on tall stalks:
a poised, superior red, like their scarlet-
caped Holy Roman namesakes, stately
little conclaves of them here and there.

Beware! Noli me tangere, or else.

How will they find out? A birdie tells them?
How could they prove that it was me and not
my sister Susan or a deer, say?

Flashing red, screaming bloody murder
a cruiser screeches to a stop. The trooper
knocks and raps his truncheon on the door. 
‘Morning, ma’am, I’d like a word with Billy’

I like the ordinary Touch-Me-Nots
orange, plentiful, and legal. I squeeze
a pod, it spits a seed at me for fun

2

The pond is fed at one end by a brook
slapping around a rock on its way in.
That rock always reminded me of the rock
where a beautiful, winged, almost naked angel
kneels and seems to bow her head in thought,
on the White Rock Sparkling Water bottle label.

At the other end a dam of old concrete.
A square hole at the top allows the over-
flow to a spillway where it widens out
to a glass-thin shallows, nearly motionless.
And then abruptly down a waterfall
and back the brook again, free at last,
from our incarceration.

3

Everywhere deeper than my height on tiptoes.
Pedaling and scissoring like mad, 
my hands in clueless semicircles, sculling, 
my upturned chin, the bow of the Titanic.

The dead man’s float, Susan may have taught me:
face down as long as I could hold my breath,
arms and legs out straight. Then, I think
I learned this on my own, to make myself
an X and paddle, like the levitated
water-walkers on a quiet surface.
 
4

My father was on on the water-polo team
at CCNY in the early thirties:
all Jews and geniuses and Communists,
versus Harvard, Yale and Princeton?
Hmmm.

He taught me freestyle crawl, told me how 
to kick straight-legged, hard, and crook my elbow
back and stroke with a flat hand. Without rocking.
And at each stroke to turn my head, just
enough to sip a breath of air into
my mostly underwater mouth. Without
gagging.

5

He stands like a colossus on the dam,
waiting for his moment.
He bounces on the balls of his feet, lets
his arms swing loosely by his side and then
flings them up together forward, leaps and flies 
a down diagonal like an airplane landing,
sliding in with hardly any splash,
the hole of his entry shutting like a wink.

I count until he broaches, kicking up
a storm of spray, his arms like paddle-wheels,
faster than a gasp, about to where
the brook comes in. Then he wades to shore,
climbs the ladder and towels off. One length
was all he ever did; one Big
Statement, needing nothing more to say.