At nine fifteen a.m.
on the first day of his eighty-
first year. Why don’t I
first-person myself?
I was hoping nobody would ask
me that question
yet. The strong smell of
chlorine for one thing, one thing
at a time, please.
For instance, there’s always
this file of exercyclists
riding the gallery
over the pool. Bums
on saddles, pommelled crotches.
The feet rotate, the
hands grip, or hang
free, or hold open a book,
demonstrating how
the mind is improved
without progression, if not without
rumbling noises and
lascivious absences.
How free-standing engines enjoy
their moving parts.
privately mounted
overhead. There’s also the deep
and the shallow end
between which the body
swims and the mind, totally
immersed, counts
and keeps count. I think
sixteen, touch tiles, turn again,
with underwater eyes
follow the black line.
Touch, thinking seventeen, turn
thinking eighteen
and enough. Whatever’s
thinkable next or only the peg
where I last hang
my clothes. A destination.
The gallery rumble-trembles, the riders
always up there were
an abstraction blooded, a
frieze the wrong side of the urn.
One grins, catching
me looking, lifts
a tattooed hand. I wave back. So.
You know how it is.
(Allen Curnow)
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Based on Topics: Mind Poems, Time Poems, Thought & Thinking Poems, Books Poems, Body PoemsBased on Keywords: privately, abstraction, lascivious, bums, tattooed, blooded, saddles, progression, improved, demonstrating, underwater