Lido

I can never not remember water.
Never once a time I did not trust
a pool or pond or Lake Erie

to faithfully displace my weight,
welcome me like a set of cold bedsheets
growing warm and calm, familiar

as the dream wears on – the one
where breast stroking the air just higher
than my parents’ arms is flying.

Every summer, mother on the beach,
oiled and brown against her doctor’s orders.
On weekends father too – too skinny –

but a knife blade in the surf to catch me
on my side stroke plunge toward Canada,
pull me back, as if a body has an undertow,

which, now, since they are gone, I realize
it has. The long sheesh after never ending sheesh
of waves reclaiming pebbles from the shore,

calling as Demosthenes, it’s time and time and time.
Each morning at the office, I float
a grain of TetraMin to my fan-tailed friend,

the lonesome king of his aquarium,
watch him steal to the surface, poise,
snap, as if predation is the only atmosphere.

Someday, we will know each other well enough.
Then I will ask him to recount his guppy-hood
the wild, the first time he went swimming.

Rodd Whelpley manages an electric efficiency program for 32 cities across Illinois and lives near Springfield. His poems have appeared in Tinderbox Poetry Journal, The Shore, 2River View, Star 82 Review, Kissing Dynamite, Barren, and other journals. Catch as Kitsch Can, his first chapbook, was published in 2018. The Last Bridge is Home, his second chapbook, will come out in 2021. Find him at www.RoddWhelpley.com.