Morning Thanks--just a poem

 I don't know that I've ever been to the Lower Chesapeake Bay, and I never was a lifeguard, so no one ever told me the different ways to save someone who was drowning. That having been said, I've sure as anything been where Maxine Kumin takes us in this memorable poem that's all about the richness of memory.

The Lower Chesapeake Bay

by Maxine Kumin

Whatever happened to the cross-chest carry,
the head carry, the hair carry,

the tired-swimmer-put-your-hands-on-my-shoulders-
and-look-in-my-eyes retrieval, and what

became of the stride jump when you leap
from impossible heights and land with your head

above water so that you never lose sight
of your drowning person, or if he is close enough, where

is the lifesaver ring attached to a rope
you can hurl at your quarry, then haul

him to safety, or as a last resort
where is the dock onto which you tug

the unconscious soul, place him facedown,
clear his mouth, straddle his legs and press

with your hands on both sides of his rib cage
to the rhythm of out goes the bad air in

comes the good and pray he will breathe,
hallowed methods we practiced over and over

the summer I turned eighteen to win
my Water Safety Instructor’s badge

and where is the boy from Ephrata, PA
I made out with night after night in the lee

of the rotting boathouse at a small dank camp

on the lower Chesapeake Bay?

During my life as a teacher, I used to tease out a little assignment: "Write a 100-word sentence. Go ahead. Take a shot." It was nothing I ever graded, just an exercise to fool around with. "See if you can control the language well enough to create a monster." 

Like me, you probably didn't realize it while reading through, but this behemoth weighs in at a little less than 200 words, all of a piece, just one sentence. 

I'm guessing withholding end punctuation was not something Ms. Kumin planned on when she started into this little memory text. It's just the way she experienced what we all do--how it is that long-forgotten memories unfold from a something tightly wrapped into a tapestry you can hang on your wall. 

That's how this one goes, isn't it?--how things grow from life-and-death lessons taught as a lifeguard, to a situational context--"the summer I turned eighteen," to a real kid from Ephrata appearing--bang!--out of nowhere, in "a rotting boathouse at a small dank camp/on the lower Chesapeake Bay," all of it documenting a memory that sounds like yucch but oh-my-word isn't, not in the least.

And you're shocked that it's still there because it's been gone, long gone, for most of a lifetime; but there it is, unbidden, recreating itself with little bits of your heart and soul. The joy of this poem is its blossoming exuberance.  

We're factory-built with zip files in some file drawer synopsis, mostly unmarked memories, but, almost shockingly, still there. Lord knows there are bad ones too, but "this rotting boathouse is anything but." 

Ice-skating came up in conversation a couple nights ago. Hadn't thought about it for years, but in an instant I was back in seventh grade at a pond the fire department created with fire hoses in the village park. Someone hauled in a little fishing shack with benches, a place for kids to put on and take off skates on January nights I didn't know I hadn't forgotten, cold nights in a steamy shack in Oostburg, Wisconsin, right there beside a summer camp on the lower Chesapeake.

That's what's cool about poetry. This morning I'm thankful for poetry.