It occurred to me twice, first when my chest tightened out of nowhere,
second when I was One with the chlorine water,
having waded interminable laps on the way to two hundred,
the Enlightenment.
The pool would utter, if it can think aloud like the lake in Narcissus, with the royal plural pronoun:
You don't have a set of gills, yet you dare treading in our watery realm?
(But then, in retrospect, fishes, or other possessors of gills, would die in chlorinated water)
You could almost hear this voice resonating in the back-and-forth lapping of the surface,
guided by gentle breeze of the rain prelude.
Mind suspended in contemplation, body suspended in this sort of reverse amniotic fluid
(it doesn't give birth; it kills)
I studied my almost still shadow on the pool floor,
tangled in strands of light, enmeshed
with what looks like the very fabric of Nature itself,
Yes, in the beginning was Let there be light, wasn't it?
And I wondered if I was being brought to the beginning or the end,
the amniotic fluid or the formaldehyde,
kindled or extinguished.
