A Summer's Poem

The Art of Levitating

-- South Cape Beach, Mashpee

In between the swimmers,

and far off, a lone sailboat or two,

is a man floating.

His face and palms, lifted

to an orange sun,

are a supplicant to light.

For many minutes he drifts

and seems suspended in water,

as in an earlier century,

Daniel Danglas Home

floated in the air eighty feet

above ground, then glided

through an open window

and sat to chat with friends.

But here there is no Tolstoy,

no Elizabeth Barrett Browning,

no applauding princes or queens

to watch our swimmer

weightless in water.

The waves lift, fall –

his globed face upturned.

For this moment, he escapes

to lightness, to buoyancy,

to the moment between lifting up

or sinking

blissful in the embrace

of forgetting.

(from Dream of the Antique Dealer's Daughter, Word Poetry, 2013)