My dad told me when he prayed over me that he saw visions of when I was little and got caught in an undertow. He swam in to rescue me and could barely fight it himself. When he had the vision, he felt both of our terrors. He wondered if
that has had an affect on my anxiety and fears. I've been thinking about it since then, and I wrote this to collect my thoughts and try to conjure up some of the emotions. It's rough, but I figured I'd post it and see what happens.
At Four, Sucked into an Undertow, Drowning
Derek Hugen, 3-2-05, revised 3-18-05
Off California coast, blue lips lick the land. The tide tows.
Then undertows. You are like a child,
With your seedling legs waiting to grow up strong,
To sew the muscles beneath that thin frame of fragile skin
That surrounds you. Once, the
Doctors had to break your collar bone to deliver you
With scalpels moving so carefully, slowly,
Tapping out the hammer on your bones so that you
would be able to see light that day. And then
You walked, heavy braced, belted,
Buckled down, bolted into heavy beams
Which defied your walk, forced strength and tired
in your steps. But even this manipulation
Of your movement that grew you hard had not
Grown you near enough to stand and to force your
Will against whichever gods would oppose your
Innocence, your child steps, wanting only to wash your
Footprints from the sand. And so you are dragged
Below this place, swept beneath a struggling tide.
You are lost. You never had control. It was illusion.
The salt water forces you to swallow it in. You
Feel it churn inside of you, suffocating and
Preparing you for death, whispering into
Your ears each step of the slow autopsy.
“We are taking the scalpel. . . can you
Feel it slide across you? See these thousand
reflections of sun bounce off the shiny shiv at
Every angle that it shifts? We will break you again
With hammers, yes. You are becoming like the tide.
And tonight, we will be together. Tonight,
We will hold a banquet out in this vast sea.”
And so you struggle dumbly, finally, to push your
Legs into a half-paddle, wanting just to go back,
Wanting to feel the sunlight again. And if you do,
You will spend the last hours of sunlight
Vomiting up sea water before you head back to Phoenix.
You start making deals with the oceans and their devils,
Memorizing what lies you are going to tell yourself
Now that you finally know there is nothing
Safe inside of your world, that those same instruments of
Destruction and life that had chained your legs
And capsized you with fear will come again to claim you
On that day when no sunlight will reflect
On the surface of the Pacific Coast but instead
Slip its light into the void of black holes and your father
Will not be there to rescue you this time, or if he is, even he
Is not strong enough to hold back the final undertow. |
