Two Women Swimming in Maine
by Sue Ellen Thompson

The breast stroke must have been
a woman's invention, its sweet economy
of motion, the mechanism out of sight

and nothing to disturb the water’s surface calm
but the head in its diurnal bob
from sleep to wakefulness. We’re swimming,

naked, in an element more solid
than liquid, of a color so distinct
from any other green I've known

I won't let myself turn back
until I've named it. With our arms,
we part and then embrace

the tide that swells the narrow cove
at dawn and leaves it, six hours later,
simmering in clam-muck.

There's the grassy point where,
eighteen years ago, I brought my college boyfriend
long before he was your husband;

where we left him shivering on the beach
to swim in those miraculous bikinis
we'd bought in Damariscotta––

stuffed in plastic tubes like wands,
transparent in the water. Now our skin
repeats this magic, vanishing

in the green opacity a foot below the surface.
If I were inclined to break
this gem-like silence,

I might confess I never loved him
the way you did. And you might say
that I'd become too much the poet,

stroking out instinctively to gain some distance.
Who would have thought that you and I,
of all our friends, would swim

the epidermis, eighteen summers trailing
in our wake? But if you're right
about me, that explains

why we can share the swimmer's cadence:
Because it's given me the words to frame
our common element, like jade illumined from below.
 

“Two Women Swimming in Maine” by Sue Ellen Thompson from The Leaving. © Autumn House Press, 2001. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)

Today is Independence Day. On this day in 1776, the Second Continental Congress unanimously adopted the Declaration of Independence, and the United States officially broke from the rule of England. The document was approved and signed on July 2, and was formally adopted on July 4. John Adams always felt that the Second of July was America's true birthday, and he refused to appear at Fourth of July celebrations for the rest of his life in protest.

Today is the birthday of Nathaniel Hawthorne (books by this author), born Nathaniel Hathorne in Salem, Massachusetts (1804). He married Sophia Peabody in 1842, and soon after their wedding, Hawthorne wrote to his sister, "We are as happy as people can be, without making themselves ridiculous, and might be even happier; but, as a matter of taste, we choose to stop short at this point."

When he lost his job at the Salem Custom House, Sophia surprised him with money she'd put away out of her household allowance just so he could write a book. And he did: The Scarlet Letter (1850), about Hester Prynne, a young Puritan woman who bears a child out of wedlock and must wear a red letter "A" for adultery as her punishment.

Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass was first published on this date in 1855 (books by this author). The first edition consisted of 12 poems and was published anonymously. Whitman helped set the type himself. He kept adding to the collection and, eight editions and 36 years later, the final "death-bed edition" contained almost 400 poems. The first edition received several glowing — and anonymous — reviews in New York newspapers. Most of them were written by Whitman himself. One such review read, "An American bard at last!" But there were legitimate reviews too; one by popular columnist Fanny Fern called the collection daring and fresh. Emerson felt it was "the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom America has yet contributed." But not everyone loved it; many called it filthy, disgusting, or repulsive, and John Greenleaf Whittier threw his copy into the fire.

It was on this date in 1931, at the Kensington Registry Office in London, that James Joyce and Nora Barnacle were wed, after living together for 26 years (books by this author). They had had their first date in 1904, and had only been dating a few months when Joyce decided that he wanted to leave Ireland to live in Europe. He couldn't face going without her, so even though he had only tenuous prospects, he plucked up the courage to ask her to come along. To his amazement, she agreed. The next night, he wrote to her, "The fact that you can choose to stand beside me in this way in my hazardous life fills me with great pride and joy." They lived all over Europe, had two children, and were usually broke — until Joyce published Ulysses in 1922. It was a financial success, and Joyce wanted to make sure that Nora and their children could inherit the royalties, so they finally tied the knot.