Tony Hoagland - Don't Tell Anyone lyrics

We had been married for six or seven years when my wife, standing in the kitchen one afternoon, told me that she screams underwater when she swims— that, in fact, she has been screaming for years into the blue chlorinated water of the community pool where she does laps every other day. bu*tering her toast, not as if she had been concealing anything, not as if I should consider myself personally the cause of her screaming, nor as if we should perform an act of therapy right that minute on the kitchen table, —casually, she told me, and I could see her turn her square face up to take a gulp of oxygen, then down again into the cold wet mask of the unconscious. For all I know, maybe everyone is screaming as they go through life, silently, politely keeping the big secret that it is not all fun to be ripped by the crooked beak of something called psychology, to be dipped down again and again into time; that the truest, most intimate pleasure you can sometimes find is the wet kiss of your own pain. There goes Kath, at one PM, to swim her twenty-two laps back and forth in the community pool; —what discipline she has! Twenty-two laps like twenty-two pages, that will never be read by anyone. Source: Poetry (July/August 2012).