The Long Distance Swimmer
Feb 5 2014


The long distance swimmer
sinks into the rhythm
of stroke, breathe, glide.
Like a flightless nymph
caught in the glue of surface tension
she exists
where air and water intersect,
the glassy plane
where up and down
are meaningless.
Through the affliction of skin, salt-water soft,
of stinging fish, and waves and wind
and sunburn, and exhaustion
she forges on,
an automaton
most at home
in water.

She escapes
from her ocean prison
from sink or swim
incessant pain,
in hallucination
mental games.

She persists
through muscle memory
and bloody-mindedness.

She will not finish
and we wonder why
she tried, and failed, again.
Like the first fish
that crawled up on land,
gills beating frantically, slimy scales dry,
until the tide
swept it back.
Like the first amphibian
who returned to be born,
she is everything
that came before.


The latest New Yorker has what looks to be a fascinating article on the open-water long distance swimmer Diana Nyad, who is remarkable both for her persistence, and her age (60 something!) This poem came to me just having seen the title page: the teaser Breaking the Waves, and a picture of her looking straight into the camera. (As of this writing, I'm still waiting to read it!) All I can imagine is that some of the detail came from newspaper pieces I'd seen previously, when she was in the headlines after finally succeeding in her life-long dream of swimming from Cuba to Florida.

The first line came to me, and for some reason I felt that little surge of excitement I get when I sense the possibility of a poem. I think I was compelled by that hallucinatory state -- that feeling of flow and timelessness and ease, that automaticity and muscle memory, that womb-like feeling of being slightly water-logged in a warm pool -- I sometimes have access to when I'm swimming effortlessly and it feels like I'm on auto-pilot. 

We're unlikely land animals: mostly hairless, and with our relatively thick layer of subcutaneous fat. And, like all mammals, we spend our first 9 months in an ocean of warm salty amniotic fluid, while our blood has the same salinity as sea-water. So just like muscle memory, ancestral memory is baked into our DNA. Life arose in the oceans; and, when terrestrial life is gone, will probably continue to exist underwater (as well as in deep layers of subterranean rock; but that's another poem!) Which is how the poems ends: the ancestral memory of aquatic life. Not that I was heading there; or, really, anywhere in particular. It's just where my stream of consciousness took me.

I like "bloody mindedness" the best: it breaks the prosody, and doesn't rhyme, and is perhaps a little too British for North American readers; but I think the expression best conveys the determination of endurance athletes.
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