Swimming Pool Archaeology

I wrote myself to relevance in my notebook!  In other words I started off with something like a reminder to myself and then moaned about an idea which had come to me while swimming and had then entirely disappeared from my memory and finally something about the weather.  It was only after a page of banality that the title for this poem came to me.

     Swimming takes up a frighteningly large percentage of my waking day: I know this because, in an idle moment, I did a little sum on the back of an envelope (the whole traditional thing) and worked out roughly how much time I spent going to the pool; getting changed; swimming; getting showered and dressed, ready to have my post swim cup of tea and complete some sort of writing in my notebook.  I have no intention of telling you what astonishing period of time this takes up during a year, but it does explain why a significant proportion of my poetic work takes its experience directly or indirectly from the swimming pool!

     Those of you who swim will know that, although swimming can be a fixation, it is, essentially boring.  You just go up and down a swimming pool.  I don't even vary my stroke, it is overarm all the way.  For sixty lengths.  A metric mile.  Job done.  It fulfils some sort of need in me, and a day feels empty if I do not do my swim, but I also recognise that it is boring.

     So, your mind tends to wander.  Strange thoughts and preoccupations fill the space and you sometimes have to remind yourself of the rhythm that is keeping you going - or the mouth full of water tells you that you need to pay more attention to the mechanics of water propulsion!

     As you are basically following a black line for your lengths, a black line on white tiles, anything which is not black or white tends to get your attention.  This is why any detritus tends to be noticed by the length swimmer.  The list of rubbish that forms part of one of the stanzas of the poem is a cumulative one, I have never seen that amount of stuff in the pool at any one time.  Our pool is kept clean and I wouldn't want anyone to think that the excellent staff do anything less then their jobs!

     But you do notice things and this poem, is like many of my poems, in being one of observation.  Observation and speculation.  At least, that is what I was aiming for.  It is for the reader to tell me whether that has been achieved!

    I have to admit that I really like the title.  I find it satisfyingly complicating!

Swimming Pool Archaeology

How long, after a normal day,

does it take the pool to purify?

And what exactly counts as ‘pure’?

The cheek-by-jowl of swimming

is not kept apart by

distance, floats and lanes;

our intimate immersion makes communion

much more visceral than lip-smudged

chalices, passed hand to hand.

We skim the clear-slab-world

and need no radar to discern

narrative debris lying there, beneath.

Under more weight than dirt can press:

scrunches, threads,

earrings and hoops,

sequins, tabs,

plasters and hair –

and other stuff too small to stop

our eyesight passing through.

I saw, during one turn,

and recognized by shape,

that which had floated off the day before:

inadequately fixed

to my wrist band,

a paper rectangle,

with printed number. 

One-o-one?

A passing thought:

I could stop.

Retrieve the artefact,

because . . . 

What is the point of keeping

something of no worth?

What purpose could it serve?

Where would it rest

during remaining lengths?

Would it survive transition to the air?

It was mine (on loan),

then lost, now found.

It was authentication

of an effort made;

a small thing

in a small-thing world,

that binds our little

lives with something,

almost like sense –

            and I had turned

and swum into the straight.

The Smartwatch Martinet

does not encourage pause.

And I swam through my

metric mile.

And then forgot.

Was my quick glance

enough to certify

the number’s truth?

How did it make

the purifying night?

Or was I making sense

of randomness,

again?

I have also completed a new version of Poems in Holy Week.  The last set of Poems in Holy Week, called Clocks of Dust were published in Flesh Can Be Bright, this year's set called Rites of Arrested Time will be published in the next volume of my poetry called . . . the eloquence of broken things . . . which is scheduled to be published in early Spring of 2017 by PRAETORIUS BOOKS.

POEMS IN HOLY WEEK iii. Tuesday - Life

I scrabble back on course with this third poem in the Holy Week sequence - not necessarily in terms of theme, but certainly in terms of production.
          Swimming is a constant source of inspiration for me and I am slowly but surely turning into a caricature of an Anglican vicar who has a single source of metaphor to explain the world!
          This poem however does, I think, take what I do and make something of it.  Swimming is important for me and it is hardly surprising that it should figure in my poetry.
          I am still trying to keep the meditative quality of the week in my thoughts and also the consideration of mortality.
          I have attempted to follow my friend Ceri's observation that in a previous poem I had ' looked and focussed in on the ordinary [and] have found a vein of truth'

Poems in Holy Week

iii.       Tuesday – Life

Sometimes, just sometimes,

swimming’s simply joy:

the strokes are almost effortless;

the water parts to let you through

and closes carefully behind

as though accepting your

progress and welcoming

your presence as a guest.

You are confined. 

                                   The

floats mark out demesne

and the black line of tiles

shows the direction you

should take;

                       they even indicate

when you should turn

to try another length.

I swim a metric mile

each day, as if it

signifies –

            while kids discard

imperatives and bounce

and splash, ignore the lines

and just get in the way.

My smartwatch measures

out my swim, and tingles

in my hands tell me my

time is almost done and

that the effort’s made.

I swim my distance,

but get out where

I got in and end a

journey nowhere.

The final stanza I first thought was too bleak, but then I thought that there was a truth in it.  In one sense it is absolutely and literally true, but it is the other senses that interest me.  When I re-read the poem I felt almost like an outsider reading the work of someone else.  I am still wondering if that is positive or negative or neither!