Indoor Pool

The athlete at a desk takes my dollar

and points me toward the locker room.

There the smell

of old socks and urinal disinfectant

hangs in the sweaty air.

I remember undressing in high school;

the panic once down to my underwear,

the sizing up.

First the whirlpool with its floating heads

where two obese women compare bunyons

and gossip about a grocer.

One old man inspects himself underwater;

a boy eyes a descending girl.

Slowly I give myself up, head back to the heat.

Locking my diaphram, I dive in,

pool empty, smooth as cellophane.

There are spheres of hair on every exhale

and a lifeguard's sinewy legs to my left.

I hear the ocean in a tropical hour

and this lane is my asylum where I imagine

sunlight and a possibility of fish.

Blood pounding I rest on the edge.

Children make awkward plunges,

their frail bodies like static electricity.

I find my towel among the colors

and walk into the shower crazy with thirst:

the water is cool when one boy borrows my shampoo,

his figure skimming mine.

He says something about a girl,

the tanned one in the pool,

and I say she was beautiful,

out of habit.