Under the Volente Raft

Jack, I’m watching you lurk there, under the raft.

You’ve put on a kelp wig. You’re champing

for minnows and little children,

trying not to laugh. The lake is yellow

and boomplash, yellow and boomplash,

yellowrush, greenrush and lurking.

You palm the surface drip of sweet

underbelly wood, cedar bell,

head a wooden duck, a lure in the late

afternoon sun where you struggle

across the buoy line and bob there

at the boundaries of ding, ding!

You thrash rings around me, gasping

shark attack music. You’ve inhaled

the whole lake and you’re sputtering

like an old boat, all warm

and yellow and obvious there.

Then, further down, your torso hangs white,

a ghost radish cast in gelatin and sawed

at the shoulders where we go under

and swim into quivering spotlights, shout

show tunes in garbled mer-speak, and then

the under, where we’d rather not, where

you drop to with high velocity, where

the lungs explode and it gets green

and tastes different, like a mineral fist,

toes just touching that cold vein, and then

the true bottom, to which we have lost

twenty pairs of sunglasses this summer,

and horrible because we cannot see it,

and quivering up from there sometimes,

a single stream of bubbles