It started as the memory of an incident - if the occasion deserves such a significant word - during a swim, and the memory emerged in the context of a freer write that was accompanying my ritual cup of post-swim tea.
When you are swimming I find that the smallest things: like a single strand of hair, or a tiny piece of tissue, or a small fragment of cloth can have an effect on your progress out of all proportion to their size and true influence.
The poem uses the gradual grubbiness of well used water as a build up to the 'flash' of the foreign body. I did stop swimming and was disturbed by the sight. Whether I thought it was a fish or a small, thrown object I do not know. But the moment was, to put it mildly unsettling.
Catching something in water is always difficult, and swimming was what I wanted to do, not twist around trying to catch - something!
It was a nothing moment, but I felt it. And in writing about it I think that the wider metaphorical meanings of the whole affair come into play.
I left the title deliberately vague, or at least ambiguous so that the open ended quality of the statement could resonate.
I suppose it is up to the reader to decide whether there is anything more in this poem than the self-indulgent thought that,
meanders freely down, along each
end-stopped line
I hope that there is something more.
Clarity was gone.
Transparent still, but not precise.
Much more Impressionist than photo-like.
Perhaps it was the numbers;
too much kiddie stuff around;
or much more likely, it was
short showers, too perfunctory,
that gave some texture to my way.
Rhythm regulates, while thought
meanders freely down, along each
end-stopped line.
It’s true, that when you swim
in something less than crystalline
you wonder what, or who you’re
swimming through as you breathe in
each person-loaded breath.
My landscape is my lane.
Each side, beyond the floats,
is chaos, but within my strip of me-ness
Shout, Kerfuffle, Splash are
foreign waters well beyond the calm
of my own ups and downs.
A flash of
yellow!
Across my path.
Unexpected and alive.
In dead-safe water of the pool.
I stopped. Confused,
disturbed
at sensing a true aspect of the depths,
that all pools mock with careful
shallowness.
My stopping showed precisely
what it was I saw:
Elastoplast, and copyright,
and coloured for a child.
But when (so public spirited!)
I saught to catch and to dispose
of what should not float free,
the bright intruder sped away.
Two lengths further on,
along my lonely line,
I was convinced it slipped
again past fingers three and four
of my right hand.
This time unseen. Though
comfort, not intrusion now.
Companionable oddness.
A thing that made
one metric mile
a little different.
Even
memorable.
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