His father told him to be careful,
to go no farther than the boundaries
of the lily cove. His father told him
once more about his cousin Archie
who had fallen into the scalding water
of the switchyard sump, because
the cinders floating between the tracks
had made it seem to be dry ground.
He wasn't thinking where he was
he wasn't watching, he was thinking
of something else, his father said.
So he agreed he would watch
where he was going, wanting badly
to get down to the lake and out
to where the bottom
wasn't clear, to where
it was not evidently safe. That day
he never came home to eat, he never
came home, he was dead, and nobody
knew it, they just
went on with whatever it was
they were doing for themselves. His father
was going on and on like that
when he ran out the door and down
to the old dock, and found the raft
hidden in the reeds along the shore,
splintery pine boards scummy
with moss and mud. And when
he pushed it into the kneep-deep water
at the end of the dock and stood, it ducked
and wavered and nearly heaved him off,
but held, an inch awash, instep-deep.
He sprawled down onto his belly
and paddled out with his hands,
like swimming - from up in the house
his father might have seen him
confidently swimming, headed out beyond
the boundaries, but in fact safe,
even should he range beyond the cove
to the dark line where the wind began -
though it was strange, even frightening,
to cup his hand around his eyes, lean
close to the surface, so that his nose
touched water, and look
through water and see
dense golden fields of weed. It was strange
to want so much to stand up on the raft,
step boldly off and walk
over the feathery tips of the weeds
to shore, his father watching, walk
straight up on shore, and call
to the terrified house
he was safe and had come back and the lake
had borne him up as he had known it would
and there had been from the first nothing
to worry about, nothing at all.
Staring down into the water, still bellied down
onto the raft, he saw
the skin of the lake thicken
with fiery clouds, because the sky
had thickened with fiery clouds,
so that there in the blazing lake,
in the pale cloud of his unwary face,
was the awful issue of the looking back.
~ John Engels