I remember how many years ago reading for the first time Charles Tomlinson's "Swimming Chenango Lake" struck a deep chord in my soul, and I forever fell in love with the poem...
***
Winter will bar the swimmer soon.
He reads the water's autumnal hesitations
A wealth of ways: it is jarred.
It is astir already despite its steadiness,
Where the first leaves at the first
Tremor of the morning air have dropped
Anticipating him, launching their imprints
Outwards in eccentric, overlapping circles...
In "The Poem as Initiation", Tomlinson cites Claude Levi-Strauss's anthropological study, "The Savage Mind":
"... the Pawnee Indians have a ceremony called the Hako, for the crossing of the stream. A poetic invocation is the essence of this ceremony. The invocation is divided, we are told, ' into several parts which correspond respectively to the moment when the travelers put feet in water, the moment when they move them and the moment when the water completely covers their feet.' All these stages are celebrated and differentiated..."
***
For to swim is also to take hold
On water's meaning, to move in its embrace
And to be, between grasp and grasping free.
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