The poem transforms an episode from my past, swimming in a pond where a girlfriend and I had to avoid poisonous water snakes. We weren’t naked and it wasn’t at night, but those details raise the erotic stakes in the poem. That’s where Sir Thomas Wyatt comes in. Wyatt’s poem explores the interplay of pleasure and risk, as does my poem. Although sixteen not fourteen lines long, my poem also operates within the idea of the sonnet, partly by creating an echoing couplet by quoting Wyatt at the end.

 

Sliding naked into the pond, you warned
me that the water snakes were poisonous.
But we couldn’t see them. They were as
black as slimy sticks corrugating the dark
surface. We hovered like solemn ghosts;
you, your seaweed hair, floating,
there and not there, an apparition
underwater, a blurred imago wanting
to emerge; and I, an incandescent light,
drained of color, scanning that way and this,
too rattled to appreciate the sensual
enjambment of pleasure and risk, which
is skinny-dipping at night in a country pond.
You laughed at my hesitation, swam over, insinuated
yourself around me, and lavished the kind of liquid kiss
which whispered, “Dear heart, how like you this?”