United States, (b. 1952)
Breathing Under Water
- Florida’s just a thumb on a jigsaw puzzle,
- but under water the Weeki Watchee Mermaids
- pour their tea, cook, exercise, iron clothes, guzzle
- with muscular skill their Grapette soda
- with only occasional surreptitious sucks
- on an air hose hidden in shell-studded scenery.
- They grin, open eyes afloat in their blue-lit skulls.
- Holding my breath was a skill I practiced, too,
- like when I was ten years old and woke to a body
- lowering onto my body, and a breath that put me in mind
- of a rotten leg, a thing I’d seen in a book once
- and which scared me, but not as much as this body
- on top of my body, these jabbing fingers. I was wildly aware
- that the room I was in was a pigsty, and I was a pig to be sleeping
- in my clothes, and I wanted to blame it on someone, which
- would have meant speaking, which I could not do—
- it would have been too real—and I was too old to blame anyone
- anyway. I closed my eyes to make the black world
- blacker. The lamp was within my reach, and a railroad spike
- I could easily have lifted, and also a bowling ball I’d found
- on the tracks, but all I could think of was being ashamed
- and dirty, and grateful the whole thing was happening
- in black and white, like those mermaids on TV, their lips
- and nails a black I knew was red, their long white legs
- safely fused in their glistening tails.
About the Poet:
Catherine Doty, United States, (b. 1952), is a poet, educator and cartoonist. She attended Upsala College and later received an MFA in poetry from the University of Iowa.
She is the author of two volumes of poems: Wonderama (2021)and Momentum (2004), as well as Just Kidding (1999), a collection of cartoons. Her work has appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, among them Garrison Keillor’s More Good Poems for Hard Times and Billy Collins’ 180 More: Extraordinary Poems for Every Day.
Doty is the recipient of a Marjorie J. Wilson Award, an Academy of American Poets Prize, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. She has worked as a visiting artist for the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, the Frost Place, Murphy Writing, and schools throughout New Jersey. [DES-06/22]
Additional information:
- Certainly not the Weeki Watchee Mermaids, but here is swimming woman feeding Ralph the Swimming Pig a bottle in the water at Aquarena Springs in San Marcos, TX.
- Yes, Aquarena Springs – where else could you see a pig swim with mermaids in the “World’s Only Submarine Theater”.