“In the Beginning,” by Alice Fulton

“In the Beginning,” by Alice Fulton, appeared in the Winter 1983 issue of Michigan Quarterly Review.

IN THE BEGINNING

the swimming teacher said, “Go with it,
it will hold
you. Don’t you know
you’re naturally pneumatic?”
Since then everything has happened
this way. What a buoyant journey!
Here I am
sensitized to the least cheep and twinge
of other beings and especially to my own
twinges. I didn’t create this pain-
ful grace. I didn’t banish the primitive.

This minute my small toes are shrinking
of their own accord. I have no say
whatsoever. Blame it on buoyancy,
without which, rambunctious and passive
as a beachball on the breakers, I
never would have bobbled here.The wild green groans
by which I lived before language
now gesture and have at me
only in dreams. I wake seeing myself
as a bottle holding an explicable

ship. Who stuffed that soul-
ful ballast of sail down my throat?
Who trimmed the rigging, intricate as nerves,
and moored the skeletal mast?
Its construction is beyond me.
I’m only the go-between
gleaming round this unknowable
cargo, headed for a speck
on the sea’s rim in the hope
it can contain the shore.

Image: Butler, Howard Russell. “Untitled (Breaking Wave).” Pastel. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.