Two summers straight I tagged
after a small herd of wary-eyed kids
from the other side of the tracks,
rough boys who seemed born to sling
rope around tree limbs, dangle lean bodies
over swimming holes dug by centuries of flow.
They all knew the streets I came from,
barely forgave my straight-edged lawn.
So I watched from a careful distance,
curious about who they were. Scum
my mother told me, with no uncertainty,
a worn-out look all her own.
One day there was no one at the hole.
My best buddy, passing a tea jar as we sat on his porch,
told me how two boys raped the shy girl,
the one who always hid behind the oak tree
to watch them whoop and whirl high above the hole,
then fall like stones into the blue backwash.
An hour after he told me, I finally asked,
how is she? He shrugged, said no one was talking,
leaving me to think how graceful swinging bodies
can be, how graceless the fall into shame,
why lucky ones cross over and come back,
and the unlucky sink into an unkind history.
Forty years later memory carves out a dream
where all the boys return, cross the tracks,
walk down to the hole, its water warm and still.
The girl is there, tight in her waterproof skin.
We wait for her to swing and dive into her past,
to pull the blue hue of innocence around her face.
It doesn't matter now, and didn't matter then,
that she never learned to swim.
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