Summer Stock We’d swim out to the tethered raft and dive and swim down to the bottom of the lake. You couldn’t see down there, but when your hand met bottom stuff you knew enough to start back up. It couldn’t have been far, but felt like you were surfacing from boundless deep and that you’d touched the bottom of the world. Of course we never saw what lay there curled up like a fiddlehead or stretched, asleep, beneath the raft or sunk last night to melt into the sandy murk. It was our part to climb the ladder, shake off, then to stand again with toes over the side and take another blind leap, each performance live.
Dan Campion‘s poems have appeared previously in Amethyst Review and in Light, Poetry, Rolling Stone, and many other journals. He is the author of Peter De Vries and Surrealism (Bucknell University Press) and coeditor of Walt Whitman: The Measure of His Song (Holy Cow! Press). A selection of his poems was issued by the Ice Cube Press in July 2022: https://icecubepress.com/2021/10/01/a-playbill-for-sunset/
Amethyst Review 