The Meadow 131 Ode to the Water Emily Hyland My father’s arms lose muscular tone, how the skin wrinkles where his biceps once held me to the sky hand and hand around ribcage. Where he has lost his wife he has found a ghost— papers and lists on her desk, catalogs mailed with her name that will keep extinguishing great trees so as to arrive through air into groundless hands. Unfettered, my dreams of jumping into the lake, idyllic arrival, the ritual stripping off of clothes, curls of toes around the edge of hot dock planks— the wide glimpse, greenery pasture of sky and sky— and the instant of gravity in the jump and dunk— coming up—a loss, too. I can no longer delight in the wish to be cool to be a wet fish, hair slicked back and long like the neck of a swan taking off on the still runway of the water’s even plane.
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