For my father, Frank Neil

An East Chop lifeguard from fifty years ago told me
How my father used to swim out beyond regulation

Boundaries and head north by northwest to a distant rock jetty.
He’d rise from the sea, she said, to walk up the bluffs

Toward home and I recall his Vineyard car
Packed full of swim fins, hand paddles, and sandy towels.

In my twenties, on visits home, I joined my parents
In the ritual of their daily morning swims, inching

Into chill water, then letting go, surrendering
To an underwater world where ordinary life receded.

I imagined swimming east toward the faraway
Shores of England or Spain, encouraged in this fantasy

By my steady, arm-over-arm crawl, the breasting of waves,
Water opening before me, closing behind me.

Now I wonder what thoughts propelled my father
On his longer swims along the rocky shoreline?

A classically trained singer who hated to audition,
Did he dream of a lost stage life, of unsung arias?

Or was he at one with an element so like his own nature,
Magnetic and volatile, that he swam like a god in the sea?