Dreaming under the persimmon tree

I am swimming through the life that I once thought of as my own. I tread water through the nights and butterfly long-armed and languidly through thickly dampened dreams, cloudlike covers over closed eyes. I am not sure when I am waking, when I am dreaming, when I am walking or falling, this is all so new.
My reality has ceased to be.
 
I find my fingers rebuilding castles out of twigs and leaves under the persimmon tree, crows overhead, crickets and cicadas reminding me of the beating of my own heart. I shiver and wrap thousands of tangled strands of hair around my bare neck. The wool sweaters I want to wear have lost their place in the queue of seasons and I search attics, basements, flooded stompers with ancient wellies and closets with dead moths decaying between the threads of dresses.
I cannot find them. I cannot find you in the tweed and linen. The muslin and brocade hide your secrets so softly and the stillness makes me cry out.

My backstroke is not what it used to be. Thanks be to god. I tread for days in these thoughts but somehow move forward with each kick, each clawing at liquid that shouldn’t hold me but it does. I see you in the jellyfish and the shadows moving over the sandy bottom. I squeal each time the flitting tail attached to teeth nips at my ankle, my thigh. You are in my thoughts as I dive below the surface to avoid the chilling wind, the frothy spray of whitehorses, the salt sting.
But I can only stay under for so long before my breath runs out and I see stars floating among the mangrove leaves and the tiny silver fish picked out one at a time by the seabirds overhead.
I must surface.
I must surface.
I must surface I say with each stroke keeping me under. Pushing me towards the grassy sea bed. My lungs ache with their emptiness, the bubbles trickle upward from my nose, my mouth.

I break through the dream-woven fabric of the ocean and think of October evenings and starlight in June. I sit still under the persimmon tree and wait for the orange globes to ripen and fall, burying me in sweetly rotting fruit, dressing me in fertile seeds and disintegrating skin. The crows keep me company, black wings stretched to infinity and eyes always looking out to god. (Looking out at the horizon it is the same as looking up. If there was a place that god existed it would be forward too, not just up. In reality it is all around. And there is no reality in that I don’t even believe in A god which makes it nothing and everything and all ones and zeros.)

I sit and knit my own sweater among the decay, among the water falling down around me and filling the gaps in the earth, creating somewhere for me to swim.