Thursday Short Poem: Olds' California Swimming Pool

No living American poet writes the body,adolescence, and sexuality better than Sharon Olds.  This isn't one of her more famous ones, but it is one of my absolute favorites.  I grew up spending my summers around a Northern California swimming pool shaded by live-oak trees, so I know of whence she writes. 

And that enticing, dangerous, captivating sense of nascent sexuality she captures in this poem is dead-on.  First time I read it, it brought back twelve and thirteen in an instant.  Still does.

California Swimming Pool

On the dirt, the dead live-oak leaves
lay like dried-out turtle shells,
scorched and crisp, their points sharp as
wasps' stingers.  Sated mosquitoes
hung in the air like sharks in water,
and when you hold up a tuna sandwich
a gold sphere of yellow-jackets
formed around your hand in the air
and moved when you moved. Everything circled
around the great pool, blue and
glittering as the sacred waters at
Crocodilopolis, and the boys
came from underwater like that
to pull you down.  But the true center was the
dressing rooms: the wet suits,
the smell of chlorine, cold concrete,
the splintered pine wall, on the other
side of which were boys, actually
naked there in air clouded as the
shadows at the bottom of the pool, where the crocodiles
glistened in their slicks skins.  All summer
the knothole in the wall hissed at me
"come see, come see, come eat and be eaten."

Comments

[annika]

holy cow! now that's poetry!

the shell shaped leaves of the coast live oak, quercus agrifolia if i'm not mistaken, do indeed have toothy edges (called dentate margins in the plant identification business) that can be quite painful if stepped on when they're dry.

[Hugo]

As my fellow Californian, Annika, I am sure you know that at least as well as I do.

[Swimming Pools]

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