YMCA Pool, Fall 1996

You practiced

breath strokes

at the shallow

end of

sentimentality

your marrowed arms,

jive,

wrapped in depreciative

orange

An iconography

submerged,

drowned

in aqueous

apoplexy

And what was swimming

then, but the tenacity of

your flailing little limbs?

you heard the shrill

 beseech of the lifeguard's whistle

crying in augury

and you began to swim

for years

yet lived

and poems

yet writ

and in those

portentous

depths

you conjured

a leviathan-

musing the fashion of

your expiry

in terms of

elephantine jaws

and carnivorous

apathy

But oh how you were mistaken.

It was but a senior citizens

fugitive excrement.

And how you hurried

out of the pool

to blanket yourself

in your mother's arms!

albeit,

no towel was qualified

to absorb

 such grief.

Reviews

[Ed Hart]

you make a wonderful sauce with your words, and carry your humor dripping