“All water is holy water.” Rajiv Joseph
A Memoir by Raphael Kosek
I don’t know how I managed to arrive at college without ever having learned to do more than a dog paddle which in my early years barely kept me afloat. My father swam across the Hudson River regularly as a boy, but somehow it was deemed “good enough” for me to swim doggy paddle. My mother was sure she had drowned in a past life and would never look down into the water or go in over her thighs. Determined not to be my mother, I eagerly signed up for a swim class my first year at college. The instructor was a rough and tough middle-aged woman who barked instructions at us and saw that none of us drowned. I loved her. Yes, I learned the back-stroke, the crawl (which is still not my favorite), the breast-stroke and the side-stroke. The first time I tried to make it across the pool, I gasped for breath. I set out to remedy this: one lap became ten, then twenty, then a mile. My seriously stressed freshman body learned to navigate water. This might be a good place to note that as a chubby child, I had never partaken of any athletic activities other than the tortures of gym class, and boogie boarding at the edge of ocean beaches, the staple of childhood vacations. I came every day to the warm, chlorine soaked womb of the pool. I swam as if my life depended on it. I learned not to care about emerging naked from the shower in the women’s locker-room; the bared body was a boundary crossed, the freedom, cavalier.
I swam a mile a day whenever I could. I swam off the freshman fifteen. I swam off hangovers, (all too often). I swam off love affairs and unrequited love, difficult projects and papers. I swam because I wanted to write poetry and because I didn’t think I could. I swam because I didn’t yet know how to live; I swam because one never really does. I swam because I wanted to get high on nothing but water and the strength of my own limbs pulling and kicking it. I swam because I could; the discipline was exhilarating. I swam because I’m an only child. I swam so I could go away and so I could come home. I swam so I could own something, so I could give something away. I floated and just let the body be the body, held up in the warm embrace of the pool.
So whenever I catch the humid, chlorinated waft of a hotel pool as we shuffle in with luggage, the teasing tang of salt after a rain, or the scrubbed clean scent of sweet water, I am transported to the element I love which has borne me above life’s disasters and anxieties—its promise of overcoming whatever needs to be released into the easy embrace of water, buoyed up by my own capable limbs—the only time I can let it all go.
Though no longer a one-miler, I swim out past the breaking waves in the cold waters of Maine trying not to think too much about sharks. Sometimes a wave is a little more than I’m expecting and roughs me up, but I’ve learned to trust my body which still remains reliable. I swim in a deep old iron ore pit rimmed with lush over-hanging trees and lazy summer raptors riding the thermals above me. Though they are both long gone, I like to think my father is pleased that his daughter can trust her own body in this joyous liquid, and maybe even my mother knows I won’t drown— as she surely believed she once did. Maybe I swim to erase that drowning, to somehow keep us both afloat.
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Raphael Kosek is the author of American Mythology (2019) Brick Road Poetry Press, and two prize-winning chapbooks: Harmless Encounters (2022) and Rough Grace (2014). Her essays and poems have received four Pushcart nominations and been featured on The Writer’s Almanac and Verse Daily. She is an editor at the Comstock Review and served as the 2019-2020 Dutchess County New York poet laureate where she teaches part-time at DCC and formerly at Marist College. She lives in the Hudson Valley with her husband and three cats. www.raphaelkosek.com