Susan Grimm
Earliest Memory of Water
Should I start with the womb. Unstable twilight with a bobble doll roll. Gushing
out and the lungs begin their semaphore like two small tidal pools. Do I
remember the bathtub on Mapledale. There were clothes behind the door
and something sad about calamine and the toilet seat, waiting to be pox-painted
all over. How to endure when you’re seven. What can you promise yourself.
I would like the first memory to be Catawba. If I could voice it like abracadabra
I would conjure my presence there. Remember the raft, half blue and half red.
We’re floating above the rocks. If we close our eyes, everything disappears but
the darkness of the self and even then the sun like a crazy lemon strains
to get through. The waves and slow the raft nudging the pebbles, turning in a circle
away from the glacial groove’s broken edge. A whole climate has dragged past here.
“I had a little nut tree/ nothing would it bear,/ but a silver nutmeg/ and a golden pear”
If you have lived in the same kitchen—steaming up with the vegetables and roasting
with the roast. If you have lived in the same bedroom, far enough from the grownup
evening to invent without crossing the rug. If you both have done miniskirts and white
gloves but not in that order. If you have sometimes dressed alike. If you have run through
coffee and men and booze and cigarettes—but not the way that sounds. If you have opened
the same book and made the same face. If you have tried to make that house again.
If you like to spend money but at different times. If one of you loves the water
more. If one of you has already almost died. If only one of you remembers
her dreams. Shouldn’t you wear your capris and sit in the sun. The chairs are red
and the masks too colorful. Shouldn’t you be the same happy and the same
strong. If you have played battledore and shuttlecock as if it were a religion—all stretch
and thwack and ascent. If one can move farther. If one can see through the dark.
Susan Grimm’s work has been published in Field, The Cincinnati Review, Phoebe, and Sugar House Review. Her chapbook Almost Home was published in 1997. In 2004, BkMk Press published Lake Erie Blue, a full-length collection of poems. In 2010, Susan won the inaugural Copper Nickel Poetry Prize. In 2011, she won the Hayden Carruth Poetry Prize and her chapbook Roughed Up by the Sun’s Mothering Tongue was published. In 2022, I received my third Ohio Arts Council Individual Artist Grant.
