A Poem For Sunday

“Swimming in the Woods” by Robin Robertson:

Her long body in the spangled shade of the wood

was a swimmer moving through a pool:

fractal, finned by leaf and light;

the loose plates of lozenge and rhombus

wobbling coins of sunlight.

When she stopped, the water stopped,

and the sun re-made her as a tree,

banded and freckled and foxed.

Besieged by symmetries, condemned

to these patterns of love and loss,

I stare at the wet shape on the tiles

till it fades; when she came and sat next to me

after her swim and walked away

back to the trees, she left a dark butterfly.

(From Sailing the Forest: Selected Poems by Robin Robertson © 2014 by Robin Robertson. Used by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Photo by Justin Henry)