As summer wore on, you became
less of a ghost.
Your skin tanned to meet
the shade of heat-struck grass.
The smell of citronella braided your hair.
â
Every day at the pool, you
with goggles and snorkel,
hid underwater and watched
the weightlessness of older girls
in bikinis, their legs
like pale mangrove roots, clean shaven.
â
(They would have forgiven you then.)
â
Submerged, there was no sound
but what you chose to hear.
â
A hot slab of concrete was the sunlit bed
that caught the wet print of your shadow.
And it amazed you
how your shape evaporated and shrunk back
â
into the air.
At night, when your mother called you home,
â
her voice seemed like something
bottomless and dark
the way it spread from the pine trees.