Pocket Change: In the Water

When artist and author Anna Brones recently interviewed me for her newsletter and podcast Creative Fuel she asked me what shape my art practice had taken throughout cancer treatment. I explained how I began waking in the middle of the night with poems pulsing through my veins. I woke often around three a.m., to sit in bed in total darkness, typing words into the glaring light of my phone.

Writing poetry seemed to fill in the cracks where my visual art practice fell to the wayside while I was ill. Words helped me locate myself during the most dislocated time in my forty three years of life. Writing poetry – even naively, nonsensically, and without context – became the only creative act I could muster, or that made kind of sense amid the chaos I felt everywhere else in my body and mind. It was one way I felt I might resist the erasure engulfing me. 

Since then I have shared only a few of the many poems I wrote during that time. When we spoke Anna gently encouraged me to share one with the interview, which was published Saturday, June 29. I agreed and sent her “August Apex,” a poem I started writing in last July then edited until the end of August 2023. Like many others, I wrote it on my phone while laying in bed. 

AUGUST APEX 
by Lindsay Gardner

In the evening
I fix my eyes on the place where they swim
shadows in the blue

this theater is contained by 
a window’s meager frame

I want to claw it 
from the drywall 
keep it all 
still and stolen

I hear their laughter 
bounce
out in the deep where they cannot touch 

ravenous for this
quicksand summer

shrieks punctuate
waves applaud

tender bodies
bold in its rush

powerful enough
to slow time
they emerge, 
dripping liquid sun,
stumbling on stones,
calling my name

Saturday, the day Anna published our conversion, was heavy with humidity. The house was quiet for a moment while our kids were outside playing. I reread the conversation and my poem and decided that it was finally time for a swim. After rummaging around in the back of the closet, I slipped on my black one-piece for the first time in almost two years. This was the longest gap of time between Lake Michigan swims in my life, and definitely the longest lapse between swims with my children. 

I looked in the mirror hanging above the dresser at the person standing in front of me. My eyes met themselves in the reflection, then drifted down to the scars on my chest and underarms, and up to the fledgling hair growing back curly and wild on top of my head, where once it had been pin straight. I noticed the faint bruise on my forearm where my infusion nurse had connected the IV for my final treatment three days earlier.

On the dresser below the mirror were all the tiny objects - talismans - sent by friends and family in the first month of chemo. A tiny black whale pin given to my friend from her grandmother when she was a child, then given to me. The white feather from an owl found by my daughter. A palm sized black crystal. A lake fossil in the shape of a heart, and a shell from the Pacific coast. I took off my rings and bracelet and laid them there beside them all. 

I walked to the beach barefoot, over acorns and chartreuse moss until I reached the water. The edge of Lake Michigan is an absolute location in the geography of my life; standing there is an embodied metaphor every time. Toes dig into the sand, ancient mineral remnants of rocks– the dust of the concrete world; eyes reach out across azure water, its undulating horizon–the sprawling unknown. I had stood on the edge in the exact same place a thousand times since my last swim 22 months earlier. I stood there when I feared for my life; when I was weak and brokenhearted; when I grasped for hope; when overcome with gratitude, astounded by the depth of the night sky and the luminosity of the stars. This time I stood breathing in cedar-perfumed wind carried by the waves and the familiar smell of sun-baked sand.

I left my towel where I stood and walked until the water came to my chest. It lapped the scar where my medi port had recently been–the ghost site of suffering and its antidote. I stood firmly on the sandbar below me and let a wave lap my shoulder, then my neck. With a breath, I slipped into its cool, blissful silence. My body was suddenly, impossibly light. All the heaviness of monitoring, slow incremental steps, medicine, scans, tubes, needles, tests, invasive intrusions and interventions it had withstood slid away for a singular moment. A cacophony of noise hushed. 

Suspended under water I felt my weary limbs lift with each wave. When I came up for air, I saw my daughter swimming a few yards away, splashing around and gleefully attempting wobbly handstands against the rising waves. Our eyes met, and we both laughed. There we were, in the water together again.