In summer,
we lived in the lake—roily, swollen
with algae. But it glistened like sweat
on our baby-oiled bodies as we dove off
the dock, swam to touch its muddy bed
before rising, our legs tangled in milfoil
and hydrilla, surfacing in a squeal.
It was a paradise I couldn’t wait

to escape.
The flirt of tennis at the public court, the park’s
salal and blackberry choked with beer cans,
the bump of flesh in a boyfriend’s Dodge Dart.

Somehow, I knew
I was only passing through
the cafeteria dance after a football game
on my way to the city, glittery
with department stores and gritty with taverns.

Knew I’d leave
the suburb where I could ride
a bike faster than a car past the deer chewing
on watercress in the drainage ditches. Knew
to leave the grip of pondweed, all that green
lapping around me. I’d crocheted a cliché
out of my own slender life.

Even the leaving
was unsurprising. The suburb expected as much,
waited for my return the way it waited
for fathers to step off the 5:30 city bus—
stroll, jacket thumbed over shoulders, home.
When the bars emptied out, everyone staggered
back to the suburb. Even me, eventually.

If I open
all my doors and windows to the house flies,
I can hear the far-off hum of the city, trafficking
another life perhaps, or just a night on the town
—the cheap glimmer of a Manhattan
on a white candlelit tablecloth, how the oil-slick
streets rainbow beneath the lights, until
the suburb once again drops a lure, dazzling
on the lake’s surface.

Heidi Seaborn

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