"california swimming pool"
One of my favorite poems by the American poet Sharon Olds.
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Here’s a great example of how poetry can dive to the heart of things. It's a poem by Sharon Olds from her book The Gold Cell, published in 1987.
"California Swimming Pool" On the dirt, the dead live-oak leaves lay like dried-out turtle shells, scorched and crisp, their points sharp as wasps’ stingers. Sated mosquitoes hung in the air like sharks in water, and when you held up a tuna sandwich a gold sphere of yellow-jackets formed around your hand in the air and moved when you moved. Everything circled around the great pool, blue and glittering as the sacred waters at Crocodilopolis, and the boys came from underwater like that to pull you down. But the true center was the dressing rooms: the wet suits, the smell of chlorine, cold concrete, the splintered pine wall, on the other side of which were boys, actually naked there in air clouded as the shadows at the bottom of the pool, where the crocodiles glistened in their slick skins. All summer the knothole in the wall hissed at me come see, come see, come eat and be eaten. I love the way this poem plunges down literally and figuratively into its subject. It’s all there in the first line, in the “dead live-oak leaves,” the leaves that flourished once but are now dried-out and dead. I love too how her metaphors call into the poem other worlds and realities which add to the central experience of the swimming pool: turtles, sharks, even the wonderfully named Egyptian city of Crocodilopolis. Turtles remind me of tortoises, famous for living for hundreds of years; and sharks feel to me like hunger itself given animal form. The “slick skins” of the crocodiles give a snake-like feeling to the poem, and that’s followed up by the hissing of the knothole in the wall—a knothole which is another sign of both life and death, where a living branch was cut short but still speaks through the hole its absence has made. Quite a few years ago I was lucky enough to spend a week having breakfast with Sharon Olds. This was at the Omega Institute, where we were both invited poets, and for some reason we were the only ones who seemed to get up and have breakfast in the cafeteria. She was famous and I was not, but once I stopped being star-struck I found her very easy to talk to. One day she insisted on taking me outside to a little tuft of grass beside a tree. “Look,” she said, “bees!” A moment later I heard the buzzing, and saw many bees entering and leaving a hole in the ground. Her poems to me are very much like those bees— beautiful and ferocious. Sharon Olds’ fourteenth book, Balladz, was published in 2022. Sign up below to receive occasional writings such as this via my ongoing Mythopoetic Field Guide.
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