Leeches
You’re not supposed to swim here.
We do –
or wallow, really – out of the violent heat.
Mud, two feet deep, floats in a moving layer
(that we avoid)
at the bottom.
Touch it and legs, trunk and then everything below the surface is swamped
in a miasma –
a swirling touch smell
a burp of foetid slime.
So we float, suspended above the suspension
or dog paddle awkwardly
(freestyle scoops mud right into outstretched hands
filling fingernails with green-black sludge).
Sometimes we hang, fingertips white, off the wooden drop bars,
grainy and algal,
and lie horizontal on the surface, listening to the thundering water fall
through the gap between the slabs
and think about the impermissible – dropping over the drop
and under the bridge with the flow
and out the other side.
Clumps of green rushes line the bank, holding earth
even where the bank is undercut and floating away
or settling into the sediment.
Sometimes we watch for tiger snakes snaking from their shelter
but what could we do anyway?
In the turbid suspension leeches blindly hunt
Invisible, fuscous, prone in the water;
Sanguivorous, they latch onto our kicking legs.