For Lisa B.
Each time we are sixteen, friends who attend rival
high schools in our Southern, segregated town. You
don’t care I’m Jewish, speak Spanish at home. Our
dads are beloved physicians, still make house calls,
write off overdue patient bills. Each time it’s the day
we meet at your house, mid-afternoon, no one home,
go skinny dipping in your backyard swimming pool—
your idea. How comfortable a slim creatura you are
in your own skin. Tall, fearless, each time you dive
into water with ease, a kingfisher’s iridescent grace,
brace fingers at the rough edge to spring out, then
in again, slice the clear surface like a leaf-blade to
the low depths, emerge as if from some halcyon
stratum, jewels in your hair, a slow-motion film in
the waning day’s glow. Years later, our fathers gone,
no contact since we were girls, my mother calls from
our growing up town to break gently the news of your
overdose—you escaped a bad marriage, remarried
someone older, kind. You were happy—they didn’t
think it intentional. The obit said heart failure, as it
often does. Each time from beneath pearlized silver,
wavy black hair frames a gleaming face, smiling
brown eyes. Water beads on skin, dissolves into air,
into sunlight, as we leap out together, plunge in again.
