"Chlorine"
from Pheromonal
by Rob Eckert
i don’t want to spend
the rest of my life
looking at the bottom of a pool:
the shadows of the other swimmers
are featureless, wriggly, unimportant.
they wind their way back
to the years i began
looking down on
the world, rather than up for it:
i look at the shadow of myself
and i would rather
i were vertical and dry
and my shadow would rather
be crisp, definite, a natural-light shadow,
and not mingling wildly
with the other shadows, besotted;
i do not want to look—
i do not want to look
at the bottom of the pool
for the rest of my life:
it is much too tempting
to want to become
one of the shadows myself:
myself, on the bottom of the pool.