But the Thing Is, When You Dive Deep, by Grey Held

into the past, results can be
iffy, conditional, distorted.
the way the underwater lens
of light plays positional tricks.
Take for example the penny
the six-year-old boy’s mom
plucks from her paisley purse
and tosses into the diving board
side of the Cavalier Club’s
outdoor pool, for a favorite
game of seek and retrieval. See
how that almost worthless coin
zigzags slo-mo down the 16 feet
to the concrete slab, where it
wavers out of reach of  the boy
often fooled into thinking some
random sunken crumb of  brownish
leaf is that coppery disk. (30 seconds)
Perhaps he finds it (60 seconds)
before  he runs out of the air
he’d gulped into the upper bunks
of his lungs, finds it before
a  danger light goes off inside
his brain and he frog-kicks
through sheets of wrinkled water
to the surface, breath exploding
into exclamation points. Maybe
he’ll climb out, blue-lipped
and shivering, shouting, I found it!  
water beads bobbing on his skin
like frigid blisters. Maybe
his mom in her blue-striped
caftan isn’t smoking a Virginia
Slim, or chatting with a friend,
having forgotten he’d been
on a mission. Suppose the penny
stands for endurance or value
or how a heart can sink sometimes.
It’s equally feasible his mom
praises him, Nice job sweetheart. 

~~~

Grey Held is a recipient of an NEA Creative Writing Fellowship and winner of the 2019 Future Cycle Poetry Book Prize. Three books of his poetry have been published: Two-Star General, Spilled Milk, and WORKaDAY. He is a literary activist, who through civic involvement connects contemporary poets with wider audiences.