Carolyn Oliver

Pool

PUBLISHED IN FOLIO 2025: VOL. 40.

She did not mean the kind
stumbled upon in a wood, ringed

with bracken, spring-fed savior
of the lost child or mirror

for teaching mortal men
to refrain from speculation;

nor the ephemeral types, tide
hollowing the rocks’ welcome or

vernal rain asquirm with rutting life
racing to outgenerate the sun. Not

those, I knew. Though she only said:
imagine a clear pool.

*
Imagine a clear pool.
With the camera, your view’s

submerged in sleek blue:
a stilled swimmer’s torso tilts

as if she peruses invisible
corals. Larval white, the curve

of her sole might have held
your eye if not for the torpedo

in streaming street clothes
shooting to her rescue. Next slide:

clasped and clasping, the women rise
to break their own reflection,

a quavering compressed against
the ventral side of the surface.

By their bodies otherwise
the water seems undisturbed.

*

The water seems undisturbed
in the stock image. Colorless

though rendered in color, lacking
both purpose and motion,

which belong to the hand—
cropped, unseen—brandishing

over the pool’s blankness an eye
dropper, quake-full of ink.

The ink is evil, my mother says,
or mere awareness of evil’s existence.

The pool is a child’s mind.
What goes in cannot get out.

You must stay the hand, she says.
Remember the pool.

*

Remember the pool?
Late eighties. Far side of August.

On the cul-de-sac, on innertubes,
two children glide, strike. The water

churns white. From the collapse
of her shiny chair, a woman launches

her pregnant body across the grass,
lurches up plastic steps, lunges in

just as I glimpse the pink lattice print
the chair left on her thighs, as if

I stood behind her on the tiny island
absurdly set into the driveway, as if

I stood there, mute and ruining
her marigolds, watching. As if

I am not one of the children
about to drown.