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Charles Fishman - At the Levittown Pool, 1952 |
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This is where I first fell in love
with people--with their idiosyncrasies
of size and shape their queer off-
balance walks their high-pitched
and raucous laughs and It was here
I fell in love with flesh: how it pushed
and sagged and bulged against nylon
and tried to escape
This was the place I became
most human: leaping with friends
into the piss-laced water we splashed
into waves racing in a chlorine
haze from one end of the turbid pool
to the other standing on our hands
in an all-male underwater ballet
The lifeguard’s screeching whistle
would echo in our heads and the molten
August sun would send down its fire
The glory was to be young and dazed
with life which swam unbroken circles
around us and would not let us drown.
Charles Fishman is director of the Distinguished Speakers Program at the State University of New York at Farmingdale, where he previously directed the Visiting Writers Program for eighteen years. His books include Mortal Companions, The Firewalkers, Blood to Remember: American Poets on the Holocaust, and The Death Mazurka, which was selected by the American Library Association as one of the outstanding books of the year (1989) and nominated for the 1990 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. His eighth chapbook, Time Travel Reports, was published by Timberline Press in Fall 2002.
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