Time, at Eel Lake
by Ralph Mohr
Central Oregon Masters Aquatics (COMA)
Expositio: The poem was written after cable swims at Foster Lake in 2015. I had a discussion on the beach with a fellow swimmer who had a PhD in English Literature and whose thesis was on T.S.Eliot. Having read Eliot’s “Four Quartets” in a seminar once, I was caught by the poet’s use of time, and I tried to apply the motif to swimming up and back the west arm of Eel Lake on the Oregon coast near Coos Bay.
| Time for open water swimmers disappears. Distance, duration and place measure time. Sun above the Eel Lake hills measures time, And the black mirror of the shadows shrinks As we enter the placid water to reach Out for the pilings at the furthest end Of the west arm. How long you ask? Five thousand yards out and back, a short hour And more when swims are measured by a clock. We can see the sun higher above the hills. Breathing on the right. Breathing on the left, We can see Bench Point where race leaders slipped And slid, and see Red Cliff where earth slipped, A smear of red. A white snag sticking out Above the water appears on the right, Almost to the pilings where a short line Train transported trees two or three cuts ago. A flip on a dead tree stuck in the mud, And we all turned round, halfway in the space Of the swim, repeating the distance gone. Fishermen gawk, kayakers pace, paddle Boarders parallel. We encounter no |
Monsters, no Scylla, no Cyclops casting Sinful stones. Not even an eel, as the lake Was named for its shape and grows only trout, Bass, steelhead, waterweed and swimmers, Who reach out, grasping the water, propelling, Push in a spiral behind, hearing air And the rush of the water in their ears, Wrapped in the envelope of their passage Through the green water. Finally the sun Clears the hills, shadows are gone, and distance Is measured by stroke and heart beat. We could have swum east, another white snag, An honest thousand yards, measured by watch, GPS and cadence, past the wasp log, Hidden colony who will measure time With their lives, season short or glyphosate. In either arm halfway is when we turn Around and swim for where we began. We measure time in reverse, snag, cliff, bench, Sun high, shadows gone. We see cars glitter, and out of the shallows, we leave footprints In the sand of the beach. The clock is complete. |
Eel Lake