How to Float by Sara Lynne Puotinen (HOW TO Series)

How to Float
by Sara Lynne Puotinen

Try to
imagine you’re
light lighter the lightest
high higher the highest, the most
buoyant.

Picture
when your daughter
cradles you in the shallow
water. Carrying you like a
baby.

You two
laughing splashing
forgetting gravity.
Unburdened by weight, land’s logic.
Carefree.

Happy.
Pretend you are
sparkling grapefruit water
excessively effervescent
bubbly.

Barely
there. Only a
hint of flavor, mostly
fizziness shimmering at the
surface.

Do not
think about what’s
below or not below
you. In fact, do not think at all
just be

relaxed.
Calm. Not Heavy.
Almost bursting with air.
Breezy & Loose. Liberated.
Unmoored.

Flat. Stretched.
Reaching out. Be
the horizon that cuts
through sky water, above beneath.
Be the

big bridge
spanning the lake.
Delivering the goods.
Linking lands and worlds and lives in
between.

Believe
in breath and your
body’s ability
to not stay sunk but to rise up,
to float.

IMAGE: Woman floating by Jennifer Bartlett (1997), used by permission.

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: Mid-June through the end of August is open swim season in Minneapolis. For two hours three times a week, you can swim back and forth across Lake Nokomis. I have been participating since 2013. I swim across the lake and then later, I write about what I remember doing/feeling/noticing during my swim in an online log. In 2018, I turned these log entries into a series of poems. This particular poem was inspired by a memory of swimming with my daughter, the desire to reflect on the joy of weightlessness, and my love of Adelaide Crapsey‘s cinquain.

PHOTO: Lake Nokomis, Minneapolis, Minnesota (October 7, 2017) by Thomson200, used by permission.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Sara Lynne Puotinen lives in south Minneapolis, Minnesota, near the Mississippi River Gorge, where she reads and writes and tries to be upright and outside as much as possible. She earned a B.A. in religion, an M.A. in ethics, and a Ph.D in women’s studies, which all inform her experiments in paying attention and her playful troubling of what it means to write while running (or swimming or moving), to run while writing, and to do both while losing her central vision from a degenerative eye disease. Her most recent project, Mood Rings, is a series of nine poems about her moods as she loses her central vision from cone dystrophy, using her blind spot and the Amsler grid as form. For more of her work, visit sarapuotinen.com.

Monet Refuses the Operation, poem by Lisel Mueller

MONET REFUSES THE OPERATION
by Lisel Mueller

Doctor, you say there are no haloes
around the streetlights in Paris
and what I see is an aberration
caused by old age, an affliction.
I tell you it has taken me all my life
to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels,
to soften and blur and finally banish
the edges you regret I don’t see,
to learn that the line I called the horizon
does not exist and sky and water,
so long apart, are the same state of being.
Fifty-four years before I could see
Rouen cathedral is built
of parallel shafts of sun,
and now you want to restore
my youthful errors: fixed
notions of top and bottom,
the illusion of three-dimensional space,
wisteria separate
from the bridge it covers.
What can I say to convince you
the Houses of Parliament dissolve
night after night to become
the fluid dream of the Thames?
I will not return to a universe
of objects that don’t know each other,
as if islands were not the lost children
of one great continent.  The world
is flux, and light becomes what it touches,
becomes water, lilies on water,
above and below water,
becomes lilac and mauve and yellow
and white and cerulean lamps,
small fists passing sunlight
so quickly to one another
that it would take long, streaming hair
inside my brush to catch it.
To paint the speed of light!
Our weighted shapes, these verticals,
burn to mix with air
and change our bones, skin, clothes
to gases.  Doctor,
if only you could see
how heaven pulls earth into its arms
and how infinitely the heart expands
to claim this world, blue vapor without end.
***
“Monet Refuses the Operation” appears in Lisel Mueller’s collection Second Language (Louisiana State University Press, 1996).

Painting: “Claude Monet, Self-Portrait” (1917)

Note: French Impressionist painter Claude Monet (1840-1926) developed the first signs of cataracts in 1914, but waited nine years before undergoing surgery for the condition. Some art critics believe that Monet painted his greatest work while suffering from cataracts, because his obscured vision caused him to see in new ways — a phenomenon that Lisel Mueller explores in her poem “Monet Refuses the Operation.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Lisel Mueller was born in Hamburg, Germany, in 1924 and immigrated to America at the age of 15. She graduated from the University of Evansville (Indiana) in 1944 and has taught at the University of Chicago, Elmhurst College in Illinois, and Goddard College in Plainfield, Vermont. Mueller currently resides in a retirement community in Chicago. (Read more at wikipedia.org.)