Outdoor Lap Pool
The down and back puts me in a contemplative
affectation occasioned by the miracle of buoyancy,
which seems like a frivolous name for a state of being
where without even having to grow a gas bladder
I can inhabit both water and air in 25-meter increments.
A human incarnation requires dual states which thought,
like buoyancy, my swim fins, and the kickboard, only makes
sense here, where a profusion of blues replicates in the border
tiles, and the synchronous rotation of lifeguards gives every
15-minute period a sense of sacredness, or solidity, providing
my mind with an anchor in time and place from which
it can roam about pondering abstractions, like the toddler
splashing with abandon in the kiddie pool who remains
loosely tethered via bungee to their long-suffering
caregiver. Every hour non-adults must submit to the
10-minute swim break, but I keep kicking along keenly
aware of my adult privileges and the permission bequeathed
by a set of plastic ropes which causes one half of the pool
to dub this interlude adult swim, while the other half sit
wrapped in their absurdly oversized towels having a snack.
I recognize two things can be true at once which reminds
me how once, during a visualization exercise, my third eye
which by all accounts should be a bright indigo color
became more like an opal whose milky surface was
flecked by tiny stars. Only several hours later did I remember
that opal is my birthstone; hence I know a handful of arcane
opal facts like how some ancient societies believed that carrying
an opal in a bay leaf could make one invisible. I suppose we
could guffaw at such fanciful ideas, all the while every human
child here yearns to be invisible, to slip past the lifeguards
making their undetected entry into the pool, swimming all
the way to the deep end where there would be no more swim
breaks, and the only evidence of their whereabouts would
be a gentle splashing against the now superfluous ropes.
Jan Elaine Harris’s (she/her) chapbook, Isolating One’s Priorities in a Time of Crisis, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2021. Recent poems appear in Abridged, Susurrus, Tiny Spoon, and Feral. Jan loves running, swimming, and meditation almost as much as she loves poems.