What You Do It For

You love the dive. The higher the better. The spandex bend of the board, the baked coconut grit on the balls of your feet, the bicuspid clamp of your toes. Pale aqua air, alabaster ceiling tiles, the lap-suck of drains. You bounce softly, holding the secret to before and after in your knees. No gun, no clock, there is now, there is champagne glass you with chlorine vapors bubbling up your spine. Your math teacher is among the rustling bougainvillea petals down there. He came. Your heart whisks into froth. You remember your cat, at home, asleep on your ruffled blue gingham bed pillow. You soda straw your body, board-buttocks-belly, and the breeze below freezes. He’s watching. You bend and spring, thrusting up and back, leaving the board throttling, and you don’t know where you are, only where you want to go, and though the way it looks to them is what matters, what you see is your secret, the nothing of everything, the nowhere of place. You’re everywhere. You don’t care about the ones like you who secretly want you to fail, to hear that Styrofoam snap, watch your oil spill, part of the horror thrill of accidental pain. The porcelain teacup of your spirit is in dispute, you remembered there is broken glass in the pool.  A dream? There’s nothing to do but let it happen, you plunge from the now to the then, the splash they hear is your teeth crunching a walnut shell, and then the sound of your own swallowing, between you and you. What is it you see at the lowest point of your dive? The dark movie theater filled, no two seats left together? a topaz sequined party dress? Salty-edged razor blades? Bicycle wheel spokes laced with crepe ribbon in pink green and orange? Bowls of oatmeal with melted brown sugar lumps? Or maybe a jellyfish clump of hair, winged Band-Aids, the thin gold=garnet bracelet you saw on the girl from upstate who will beat you by two tenth of a point? You would like to stay down, for now, in the place of marshmallow creme and cold coffee sludge. This is what you do it for.