September 14, 2021

the currency of our attention **

It isn’t hard to imagine the scene as the lifeguard did: among the thrashing
afternoon revelers, a lone unmoving figure, face-down in the deep end. And from there,
both the hyper-speed and slow motion of the what-next, the flight from a stiff-backed
perch above the pool, the young girl unresponsive, the metronome of compression, 
the wild paroxysms of a mother, helpless at the outskirts, the tunnel of oxygen from one 
set of lungs to another. The news was good that day. It might have been luck.
It might have been good timing. It might have been that three weeks into her new job, 
the lifeguard hadn’t spent the currency of her attention on one disaster after another.
She gave everything she had in service to the single stranger at her feet.

I’m telling you, we all have a breath like that.

** This poem was inspired by a news article from 2019, entitled “Teen Lifeguard Saves Child with CPR.”