NJGPA Practice Test 14

Poem 1: Floating Lesson — by Lucía Beaumont

¹Lie back. I know. The whole lake wants to pull you down / and every part of you believes it. Lie back anyway. / Put your ears under. Let the world go thick and slow, / the gulls turned into rumors, my voice into a hum / you feel more than hear. My hand is under you. / It is only a hand. It is enough.

²Here is the first secret, the one nobody told me / until I was older than you and still afraid of deep water: / the lake is not trying to drown you. It does not care about you at all. / That sounds cruel. It isn't. It means you do not have to fight it. / It will hold anyone who stops kicking long enough / to let it, the way a stranger will give directions / to anybody who asks and does not shout. / Water is the oldest stranger. It has held up / leaves and logs and loons and every child / who ever stopped believing that it wouldn't.

³Unclench your hands. Your fists are anchors. / Open them as if you were letting go of two small birds. / Push your stomach up toward the sky, toward that one cloud / shaped like nothing. There. Do you feel that? / That is not me. I took my hand away / three breaths ago. That is the lake. That is you.

⁴Don't sit up. I know you want to sit up and look / to make sure it's true, but looking is how you sink. / Some things you have to believe from underneath. / Count the clouds. Count your breaths. If you need to, / count my fingers in the water by your shoulder, / five, still there, though you are not using them. / The sky will not fall on you. The lake will not open. / Nothing is going to happen to you except this.

⁵Your hair is spreading out around you like dark weed. / A dragonfly has landed on your knee and you have not noticed. / This is what floating is: being so still the world forgets / to be careful around you. Your grandmother taught me here, / on a day hotter than this one, and she said nothing at all. / I am the one who talks too much.

⁶Someday you will be in water I can't stand in, / deeper than this, colder, with no dock and no sand / and no one counting. You will be tired, maybe, / or frightened, or both, and your body will tell you / what it is telling you now: fight, kick, climb. / Remember this, then. Lie back. Open your hands. / Let the lake be a stranger again, the kind / that holds you up without asking who you are.

⁷The deep water is the same water. / It holds the same way. It always did. / I was only ever the part of the lesson / that you could see.

Poem 2: Answer, from the Deep End — by Celeste Adair

¹You told me the water didn't care. / You said it like a gift, and it was one, / and I have carried it a long way—into city pools / where the lifeguards were bored, into a cold green river / on a canoe trip when the boat went over / and everyone screamed but me. I lay back. I opened my hands. / The river held me like a rumor of you. / I have floated since in a hotel pool at midnight, / in an ocean so warm it felt like breath, / in a quarry where boys dared each other to jump.

²But I have to tell you something, now that I am older / than you were that summer. You were wrong about one thing. / You said you were only the part of the lesson I could see. / You were never the part I could see. / I had my ears under. I was looking at a cloud. / You were behind me, out of sight, the whole time.

³Here is what I remember, and you don't: / not the hand under my back, but the moment you took it away / and kept talking in the same voice, the same slow hum, / so I wouldn't know. I was nine. I thought the voice was the lake. / That was the trick. Not the water. / Water holds anyone, you said. True. / But water does not keep talking to you after it lets go.

⁴I have a son now. He is six. He is terrified / of the lake behind the cabin, which he believes contains / a fish the size of a car. Maybe it does. I don't argue. / Yesterday I put my hand under his back and told him your secret, / the water doesn't care, and he looked at me / as if I had told him something terrible. / He likes rules, my son. He likes to know who is in charge. / A lake that does not care is a lake with no one in charge.

⁵So I changed it. I hope you will forgive me. / I said, The water doesn't care, but I do, and I'm right here, / and I'll keep talking the whole time, even when you can't feel me. / And he lay back at last, his fists still tight as walnuts, / and I took my hand away, and I kept talking—about clouds, / about dragonflies, about you—and he floated / three whole breaths before he noticed and sat up, laughing, / and sank, and came up sputtering, furious, delighted.

⁶The deep water is the same water. You were right. / But I think the voice is the same voice, too. / It goes on after the hand is gone. / It went from you to me, and from me to him. / It is going on now.