Alison Luterman USA
Because even the word obstacle is an obstacle
Try to love everything that
gets in your way:
the Chinese women in
flowered bathing caps
murmuring together in
Mandarin, doing leg exercises in your lane
while you execute thirty-six
furious laps,
one for every item on your
to-do list.
The heavy-bellied man who
goes thrashing through the water
like a horse with a harpoon
stuck in its side,
whose breathless tsunamis
rock you from your course.
Teachers all. Learn to be
small
and swim through obstacles
like a minnow
without grudges or memory.
Dart
toward your goal, sperm to
egg. Thinking Obstacle
is another obstacle. Try to
love the teenage girl
idly lounging against the
ladder, showing off her new tattoo:
Cette vie est la mienne,
This life is mine,
in thick blue-black letters
on her ivory instep.
Be glad she’ll have that to
look at all her life,
and keep going, keep going.
Swim by an uncle
in the lane next to yours
who is teaching his nephew
how to hold his breath
underwater,
even though kids aren’t
allowed at this hour. Someday,
years from now, this boy
who is kicking and flailing
in the exact place
you want to touch and turn
will be a young man, at a
wedding on a boat
raising his champagne glass
in a toast
when a huge wave hits,
washing everyone overboard.
He’ll come up coughing and
spitting like he is now,
but he’ll come up like a
cork,
alive. So your moment
of impatience must bow in
service to a larger story,
because if something is in
your way it is
going your way, the way
of all beings; towards
darkness, towards light.
Originally published in The Sun
© Copyright, 2011,
Alison Luterman. |