Years ago, I used to swim four or five times a week at the old McBurney Y on 23rd Street across from the Chelsea Hotel. You got your own lane for half an hour swimming at your own speed, your arms and legs in sync, not only in meditation, but in a new way of being like you’re a graceful otter suddenly or a fish propelling yourself forward straight ahead. Swimming freely is the best.
Jennifer Firestone’s chapbook, Swimming Pool, is long and narrow like a swimming pool. It is sleek, attractive and a record of twenty-five swims the poet took. The poems are narrow and long like the lane of a pool and reading them I often feel like what it feels like to swim. Jennifer Firestone reads from Swimming Pool in the Vimeo below. Enjoy.
I have typed out the first swim and the last swim in Swimming Pool.
First Swim
The first time you swim in the pool you swim between two men. Their bodies cut the water a mechanical rhythm. An arm cuts through a pan of glass. In between you, hesitate, find a stroke. Their back current, a slash in your mouth. “Hey, get into the slow lan.” Wet chest hair, goggled eyes. Masaru Emoto believed consciousness could change the molecular structure of water, that polluted water could purify from positive thinking and prayer. In your underwater poem you drape lines and release them not remembering how they came. Your legs inside massaging. The public pool is tricky, the urbanites need efficiency. A cardio clock-in. But the body of swimming thinks otherwise. You cannot own what’s unshaped. What shifts, glides. They treat it roughly like captains or slap it. But it comes back without separation or separation leading to fusion, one drop becomes mass. You need to jump in, find your rhythm. You’re not a fish you’re human. You need an entry. A relationship that makes sense, that gives a bit more. The glassiness misleading, pours in your ears and you hear differently, a foggy subject becoming all at once, instantaneous. The mind gravels. Go.
Twenty-fifth Swim
Imagine the pool as a diorama. Freeze this frame now and whatever’s there becomes fixture. Depending on what was happening you might see stoic bodies moving uniformly through the water or just splashes, discordance. Or perhaps both of these ways of being could be contained. The video camera is a bit aimless today. It doesn’t have a plan, or motivation or even interest in getting the right shot. It looks at you for cues: how would you like to move. Do you have something to say? You take off and your poem writes: What’s in the frame is not so much about the subject. Whom have you made subject? This water can temporarily transform. Of course, if you look deep, you can still find your poison but you will feel different. You went somewhere else for a small bit. Some days you really feel so much joy being around all these people, strangers you don’t know but you swim with their bodies. Wherever you go, whatever you saw on the news or heard from a song you can count on the physicality of these bodies so close to you. If you are okay, you can close your eyes, your poem will help you. You can extend like a plane and others might join you. You might be a swerving blue underwater creature that the camera will chase. You might be a wild poem, cutting words.
reading and writing and swimming, or learning to, what a find, this book, poet, poems, swimming pool; she reads so fluidly, too.