October 17: Garrison Keillor, Maxine Kumin, "Morning Swim"

Garrison Keillor chose this Maxine Kumin poem for The Writer's Almanac on June 6, 2003, on the occasion of Kumin's birthday.

Kumin was a neighbor of former U. S. Poet Laureate Donald Hall, and she was good friends with poet Anne Sexton.  Kumin's parents were Holocaust survivors, and, at the beginning of her career, she struggled to be taken seriously as a poet.  Women weren't supposed to be poets; they were supposed to be wives, mothers, homemakers.  They weren't supposed to be making poems; they were supposed to be making meatloaf and apple pie.

It amazes me that a poet as great as Maxine Kumin would struggle at all as a writer.  Yet, she and Sexton were both up against editors who, as a rule, only took one poem a month from women.  Yet, out of that crucible, came poems like the one below.  Poems of great solitude and beauty.

It almost makes Saint Marty want to go for a swim.  Almost.

Morning Swim

by:  Maxine Kumin

Into my empty head there come
a cotton beach, a dock wherefrom

I set out, oily and nude
through mist, in chilly solitude.

There was no line, no roof or floor
to tell the water from the air.

Night fog thick as terry cloth
closed me in its fuzzy growth.

I hung my bathrobe on two pegs.
I took the lake between my legs.
 

Invaded and invader, I
went overhand on that flat sky.

Fish twitched beneath me, quick and tame.
In their green zone they sang my name

and in the rhythm of the swim
I hummed a two-four-time slow hymn.

I hummed "Abide With Me." The beat
rose in the fine thrash of my feet,

rose in the bubbles I put out
slantwise, trailing through my mouth.

My bones drank water; water fell
through all my doors. I was the well

that fed the lake that met my sea
in which I sang "Abide With Me."