10 June 2006 | Vol. 6, No. 2

Morning

by THEODORE WOROZBYT

Clotted chestnut, boiled thick with silt,

the calm lake wrinkles light, one storm over.

My breast stroke cuts through water, I shear time

toward a swamping dinghy. Tight hands scalpel

currents on my chest. Four boys stand

four years old, in the boat.

A fifth floats, face swayed to bottom,

near the prow. They stare, unalarmed.

I clamp my lips to his through water.

Nose pinched, rose lungs inflate.

The boat is filling with balloons.

A spawning bass thumps in an ice chest.

I wade: on a bank's dry lip the doctor

stands in his long, immaculate coat. I yank the red-

tubed stethoscope from his throat. A priest watches:

I press my steel circle against the boy's thoracic nest,

fibrillation. Call the ambulance, I yell,

and the white coat murmurs, Stroke

the carotid artery with your thumb.

I rub blue throat-putty but he looks up limp-eyed.

The four trail me, leaving. The deadest shrivels, a wet mummy

white as something in a coded jar, pickled for dissection.

Hairless, earless, mouthless: the drained, amphibious body.

Black specks like frogspawn punctuate the head,

staring through jelled lids at something before the human.